Most political plans go wrong either because unforeseen events get in the way or because wholly foreseeable events were ignored in the planning. Liz Truss’s ambitions for a policy blitz in her first weeks as prime minister belong in the first category. She couldn’t have known the Queen would die, and politics would be suspended for national mourning.
The prime minister’s admission on Monday night, en route to New York, that there will be no UK-US free trade deal is the second kind of failure. The scale of it must not be downplayed just because it feels inevitable.
