For all the comedy drama of Donald Trump’s Scottish visit, the implications for UK Plc and London as its fulcrum are positive. Or rather, are a lot less negative than the EU-US trade deal, which left the EU Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen looking as if she had swallowed a particularly unappealing haggis.
It is also a moment which consigns the post-Brexit era to history — not because it has been healed, but because the major impacts of the tariff era are more far reaching. And because, bluntly, the damage to Europe from a US president remaking the global trade order by fiat is much more harmful than the dents to the UK of leaving the European Union.
