“Let Them Eat Cake”

While Boris Johnson has claimed that the post-Brexit trade deal allows Britain to “have one’s cake and eating it“, it is becoming abundantly clear that this is not the case.

The latest twist is that British exporters to the EU are being encouraged by the UK government’s Department for International Trade to set up companies in the EU to circumvent border issues and VAT problems.

Far from having one’s cake and eating it, this sounds more like Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal response to the news that starving peasants could not afford to buy bread.