In his time as the Telegraph’s Europe editor, Peter Foster showed little of the imagination of his Brussels-based predecessor (by two decades) Boris Johnson – to his credit. Instead of fabricating stories about power-crazed Eurocrats, he specialised in detailed accounts of the inner workings of the European institutions, and especially, after June 2016, the back-and-forth of the Brexit negotiations. Despite the increasingly deranged tone of the Telegraph’s opinion pages, his unquestioned personal commitment both to finding out what was going on and to reporting on it as objectively as possible meant that he often knew what had been decided in key meetings on the Commission’s Brexit strategy before the Foreign Office or No 10.
It’s not surprising then that his book contains a wealth of detail, both about the damage done to UK businesses small and large by Brexit, and how at least some of the worst effects could be mitigated. Whether it’s an organic tea trader forced to relocate their warehouse to the continent or the risk to the UK car manufacturing sector of the application of “rules of origin” to electric vehicles, Foster excels in explaining the reality of how trade works in the modern economy.
