‘Disbelief’ as US-UK trade deals under threat after Britain axes negotiators

The trade teams worked on deals with individual US states signed by Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, on trips to America. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/PA

America was meant to be Britain’s route to the sunlit uplands of Brexit. Then, after hopes of a free trade deal evaporated, successive Conservative governments have set their sights lower, by trying to forge closer ties with individual US states.

Now the civil servants responsible for delivering those state-level deals have been let go, in what a furious British businessman described as “an act of arson”.