There it is! I said to myself, and with trembling fingers I reached into the chilled display. It felt like hours that I had been scouring the shelves in the vast Texan supermarket, scooting up and down the aisles as long as Westminster Abbey.

I had patrolled the entire dairy section – great vats of yoghurt and cream all pasteurised, homogenised, centrifuged and irradiated to the point of total macrobiotic extinction. I had inspected every single offering that called itself ‘cheese’.

Cheese! You know this American stuff. This is cheese designed by Fisher Price or Kiddicraft – tragic little squares of emulsified blandness, clinging limply to your hamburger like yellow ochre goo. How can the poor Americans eat it? How long can they suffer? Where is the emmental? Where is the gruyere and the roquefort and the ancient cloth-wrapped truckles of Somerset cheddar?

As readers may have gathered, I am a big fan of America. But when it comes to cheese, my friends, I am an out-and-out European.

So you can imagine my relief last week in the H-E-B supermarket when I finally saw a tiny corner of the display that was given over to European exotica – small, shrivelled, battered-looking refugees from the old continent. There was a triangle of real parmesan, and there – the only thing in the entire shop that seemed unambiguously to come from Britain – a five inch chunk of stilton!

I grabbed it and carried it off. Think of the odyssey endured by that chunk of cheese to penetrate that Texan shop. British cheese faces tariffs of two dollars a kilo, but that is just the beginning.

To get on American shelves, cheese must be provably made of pasteurised milk. It must undergo microbiological testing, and conform to tough US packaging requirements, or else it will be destroyed at the border by the ruthless folk of the US Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

The whole thing is insane: a cultural disaster for America and a chronic insult to British agriculture. The answer is obvious – and it is a new era of transatlantic freedom. In the current White House spat between the free-trading Elon Musk and tariff junkie Peter Navarro, it goes without saying that I am on the side of Elon – one million per cent.

As Elon says, there is a way out of the current convulsions over tariffs, and that is to create a gigantic zero-for-zero free trade zone between Europe and America. This country now has an amazing opportunity – post-Brexit – to lead the way. We can be faster and nimbler than our EU friends. We can dispense more quickly with the taboos.

We have fewer special-interest groups to appease. We can complete the work we began in the first Trump term. After the painful indifference of the Biden years I know – and Keir Starmer knows – that in Donald Trump we have a partner genuinely keen to do a deal that works for both sides.

Some things will require patience. The Americans may be insane in their regulation of UK cheese, but then we have our own anti-scientific prejudices about some American food. We will need clear labelling, and a will, on both sides, to compromise. But some things will be easy.

It really wouldn’t be difficult for the US to open up to aviation cabotage – so BA can fly you point-to-point in the US – as well as opening up in other US service sectors. As for the UK, we still have a 10 per cent tariff on American cars – which until April 2 was far higher than the US tariff on British machines.

Why do we charge 10 per cent? It’s a pointless legacy of EU membership, an obvious UK discard in the coming negotiation. The reason you don’t see many Dodge Rams in the Sainsbury’s car park on a Saturday is nothing to do with tariffs. It’s because it’s like trying to park an aircraft carrier – and its engine is designed for a fiscal regime where a tank of petrol costs 40 dollars.

We can help make peace in the growing trade war with China, because it is China after all – not us, or Europe, or Canada – that is the real object of American wrath, writes BORIS JOHNSON

American cheese is designed by Fisher Price or Kiddicraft – tragic little squares of emulsified blandness, clinging limply to your hamburger like yellow ochre goo

We don’t need tariffs against US cars, and for the right price we should drop them. This is the moment – when the markets are tanking and the commentators are panicking – for the UK to seize our Brexit advantage, step up, and lead the way out. I hope and pray Starmer has the boldness and drive to do it.

We can be the bridge-maker, and at the same time we can help make peace in the growing trade war with China, because it is China after all – not us, or Europe, or Canada – that is the real object of American wrath. And the Americans, frankly, have a point.

Since the early 1990s, China has brutally exploited its membership of the world trading system to build up colossal, unsustainable trade surpluses with the rest of the world, especially the US.

Beijing has manipulated the Chinese currency – keeping it low to drive up exports, while restraining consumption at home – and ensuring that its own markets remain effectively closed, especially to the service exports in which the UK and US excel.

The Chinese continue to engage in wholesale industrial and technological espionage. They are increasingly aligned with the world’s bad guys, backing the Russians against Ukraine, and with some Chinese soldiers even now fighting for Russia.

American anxiety about China has been growing for years – among business people and politicians. Until Trump, no one has had the guts to try to do anything about it – for the simple reason that it looks too difficult.

As everyone is today asking: how can you wallop China with 145 per cent tariffs, when 85 per cent of manufactured goods on the shelves of Walmart come from China? What will that do for inflation? Or consumer confidence?

And what is the end-game? It sometimes seems the White House autarks want a return to a 1980s Bruce Springsteen world of sweat-stained blue-collar workers hacking coal and forging steel while their wives sit in rows stitching jeans and T-shirts. Is that really the future for the US economy?

Is the US consumer really going to pay $10,000 for a US-made iPhone? No one believes that.

The best way forward is to use this moment, and the tariffs, to drive positive change: to get the Chinese to recognise their behaviour is a problem, and that they have been effectively cheating.

In the process of dialling down the trade war, we need to get the Chinese genuinely to open their markets to the West – especially in services. That would be fair.

That would be a massive win for the world – and the UK can lead the way in helping to make it happen. Sure, what is happening in global markets right now is chaotic, and unsettling. But it is a chaos that is opening up the possibility of addressing long- standing economic problems.

It is time to remember the origins of this country’s success as a free-trading nation, to help solve the China problem – and with real transatlantic free trade to give the benighted Americans the chance to eat more UK cheese and acquire an addiction they will never regret.