"Trump is emotionally pro-Brit", Reform leader Nigel Farage declared to a room of journalists at a lunchtime gathering in the Palace of Westminster this week.
"Trump is the least isolationist, probably of the whole of the senior Republican party" he claimed.
In his usual brash manner, the friend of US President Donald Trump lamented that when it came to a free-trade deal with the United States, "we've blown it".
He asserted that Donald Trump once told him that he wanted a deal with the UK and admitted to Mr Farage "this will give you [the UK] more than it will give me, but I want to do it".
However, the Reform leader was sceptical about whether this would be possible now.
His comments were timely, as they were delivered while intense negotiations were underway to secure a UK-US trade deal to avoid tariffs.
The most recent threat from the US President, a 25% tariff on car imports, came just hours after the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer announced further cuts to government spending in a bid to shore up the public finances.
During her Spring Statement on Wednesday afternoon, Rachel Reeves vowed to restore £9.9 billion of fiscal headroom in five years’ time.
She was forced to do this, as the headroom she had left herself after last October’s budget was wiped out by higher borrowing costs and sluggish economic growth. Her firm commitment not to borrow more to fund day-to-day spending meant that she had to find savings.
Her "fiscal headroom" however is wafer thin in the context of overall government spending, which was over £1.2 trillion last year.
A poor economic performance over the coming months could force her to come back for more cuts. This was the assessment of the independent economic research organisation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
It argued that Ms Reeves had left herself open to six months of "damaging speculation and uncertainty over tax policy".
And so, Donald Trump’s declaration that he would impose tariffs of 25% on car imports was not welcome news for the Chancellor just hours after her Spring Statement.
"An escalation of tariffs would be bad for the UK but would be bad for the US as well", she warned the next morning.
However, there is a glimmer of hope for the UK. And that is the US President’s desire for a trade deal.
"I think we could very well end up with a real trade deal where the tariffs wouldn’t be necessary. We’ll see", he told reporters at the White House during Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s February visit.
For all the warm words however, the UK is also preparing for the prospect of no-deal. On Friday Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that in such a scenario, retaliatory tariffs to protect UK interests are on the table.
It would be a damaging setback for Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
The Office for Budget Responsibility warned this week that a 20-percentage point rise in tariffs between the USA and the rest of the world would reduce the size of the British economy by 1%.
While such a situation may be avoided, an imposition of tariffs will only fuel speculation that Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement was not enough, and she’ll have to come back for more.
