Well, it’s a start. I am not going to claim that this sudden Trump-Starmer announcement is a great new free trade deal – because everyone can see the truth. We haven’t even got rid of all the new tariffs imposed in March.

We still face 10 per cent tariffs on cars – much higher than they were last year. But at least they aren’t 27.5 per cent. At least British steel and aluminium exporters are back where they were under Joe Biden.

There are some new openings for food products – and the potential, of course, to do much, much more on both sides, from tech to pharmaceuticals. Above all, there is the great glaring geo-strategic point, one that Keir Starmer (predictably) failed to make.

There is only one reason why Britain has been able to beat the EU and do this early deal, and that – as Trump rightly said – is Brexit. More precisely, Starmer has been able to agree this deal because of the so-called ‘hard Brexit’ negotiated in 2019, which truly restored this country’s control of its regulations and tariff schedules, rather than the tragic and subservient models of Brexit that were under previous consideration.

We need urgently to maximise our new freedoms, because Britain is now in an extraordinary position. This new agreement shows how we can be the bridge, the intersecting set between the European and the American economies. It shows how we can use our new independence actually to strengthen the transatlantic partnership, and strengthen the West.

Look at the combination of the US, the EU and the UK. We are together 40 per cent of global GDP; and yet we are far more than that. As Edward Gibbon put it, we are the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.

We share ideals of freedom and democracy. We have the same broad understanding of how our societies should work – and we face the same geo-strategic challenge from the autocracies, and especially from China.

It is therefore absurd that we continue to throw up barriers between us – not just tariffs, but rival and competing rules on everything from AI to banking to cars – many of which are actually expressly designed not to protect the public but to inhibit free trade.

There is only one reason Britain has been able to do this early deal with the US, and that is Brexit, says Boris Johnson. Pictured: Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Trump in February

The so-called trade deal announced yesterday makes no difference to the vast majority of mad and protectionist American measures against UK exports. The United States continues to discriminate against shower trays made in this country – though you are no more likely to slip in the shower in Britain than you are in America.

The US continues to apply flame-tests to UK-made soft furnishings, though our sofas are no more combustible than theirs. The American authorities are apparently so alarmed about a potential influx of British cauliflowers that they require these harmless vegetables to make landfall only in Miami.

Other European countries face very similar restrictions, and we must accept that we Europeans are far from guiltless ourselves. For decades we have had tariffs on American cars four times higher than they have had on ours. We have whipped up our populations into scientifically groundless phobias about American food. The EU still has its quaint insistence that Parmesan cheese and Parma ham must be made in Parma – which makes about as much sense as demanding that every hamburger in the world must be made in Hamburg.

We should be using our changed geo-political position to demolish this nonsense, and to become the world’s most dynamic and incorrigible campaigner for free trade and economic common sense.

We don’t need these deliberately discriminatory and exclusionary systems of standards, which are largely created by lobbyists and special interest groups and are of no public benefit. We don’t need tariffs, when our economic models are so similar, and when we all know that tariffs just hurt business and consumers on both sides.

We are in an ideal position to make the case to both sides. We are a £3trillion economy, with the biggest financial services sector and the biggest tech sector on our side of the Atlantic. We can help the Americans with the Byzantine complexities of the EU, because we literally know it inside out. We can help the Europeans to overcome their superstitions about America.

By strategically opening to both sides – as we are now doing – we can bring Europe and America together. The UK should now set up a transatlantic trade council, based in London, Brussels and Washington, with the aim of creating a zero-for-zero EU-UK-US tariff-free zone, combined with a programme for gradual mutual recognition of standards.

There is no need to harmonise, no need to create jumbo transatlantic regulatory bodies. All you need is a common sense recognition that goods deemed safe to be put on the market in the US are overwhelmingly likely to be safe to be put on the market in Europe, and vice versa.

Where there are residual anxieties, they can be solved by labelling. Remember – there is simply no need for most of these national or EU standards. There is a growing body of global safety standards – such as the Codex Alimentarius for food.

Get rid of these transatlantic barriers, and the benefits will be enormous. We will build up reliable and friendly supply chains between the democracies. We will grow our economies together. Above all, we will stand up together – as the West – to the challenge of China and its satellites.

When Xi Jinping met Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, he was visibly the dominant partner. Together this autocratic duo will do anything they reasonably can – overtly or covertly – to undermine or destabilise the West.

They don’t believe in democracy or political freedom. They saw what happened to the old Soviet Union. Putin thinks political freedom shattered his country. Xi thinks it would mean the same for his, in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and so on.

So they keep going together with a mixture of internal repression and outward aggression: Putin with his Xi-enabled war in Ukraine, and his general campaigns of subversion, Xi with his mercantilist economics.

How do we deal with them? By uniting the West – strategically and economically. With its advantageous new trading position, and a foot in both camps, an independent Britain is uniquely placed to bring Europe and America gradually together.

That is just one of the reasons why it would be utter madness for Starmer now to try to bring us back into the orbit of the EU, as he seems to be planning to do. He should beware, and look at the polls.

If he submits to regulatory alignment with the EU, and makes us the non-voting punk of Brussels, he will face political extermination – you watch.

He will also make it impossible to achieve a real free trade deal with the US. He will thereby deprive this country of a historic mission: to help create a new transatlantic economic partnership, and unite the Western world.

Former US secretary of state Dean Acheson said that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a role. Well, this is that role. But to perform it we need genuine regulatory freedom, and genuine control of our tariffs – and it is only Brexit that makes it all possible.