LONDON — Dominic Cummings, the maverick former aide to ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson who masterminded the 2016 Brexit campaign, has other fish to fry these days.

But on Monday he interrupted his stream of prophecies about immigration, censorship and the failures of the political elites to note what a terrible trade deal the European Union had struck with U.S. President Donald Trump.

“Thanks to Brexit we’re outside this humiliating disaster for the EU and the many more to come,” Cummings wrote in a post on X which he began with two clown emojis.

For a man known for colorful language and an insatiable appetite for savaging his former colleagues, the gloating seemed a little half-hearted. Perhaps he felt there was no point overdoing it, given how badly the deal had gone down inside the EU itself. 

The trade agreement Brussels reached with Trump at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland on Sunday wasn’t even hailed as a triumphant victory by Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president who negotiated it. The best she could say was that it “creates certainty in uncertain times.” 

Gallingly for Europeans, the raw numbers showed that the EU, with a 15 percent baseline tariff on its exports to the U.S., had achieved a worse result than post-Brexit Britain, which negotiated a lower tariff rate of 10 percent on goods sold into the American market. On top of the tariffs (which the EU will not apply to U.S. imports), Brussels committed European countries to spending hundreds of billions of euros on American energy and defense supplies. 

French Prime Minister François Bayrou said the deal represented a “dark day” as he lamented the Commission’s capitulation. Commentators complained that the EU had not fought hard enough and should have retaliated against Trump’s tariff threats to demonstrate the sort of strength that he might respect. 

But Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, won out with his calls for a speedy deal, refusing to put his manufacturing-heavy economy at risk in a transatlantic trade war. “Please let’s find a solution quickly,” he said in Brussels a month ago. For Merz, that old phrase from Brexit negotiations — “No deal is better than a bad deal” — seemed not to apply this time.

While the legal details of Trump’s agreements are yet to be worked out, for some in the EU the U.K.’s apparently superior result stung most of all. “We seem to have gotten worse conditions than the U.K.,” said Brando Benifei, the Italian MEP who chairs the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the U.S. “That’s not a good starting point.” 

The question EU officials don’t want to ask is whether Trump’s transatlantic trade shakedown, more than any other episode in the five years since Britain left the EU, may be the moment Brexit finally paid off.

Brexit bonus

In London, Keir Starmer’s Labour government was diplomatic in its tone but clear in public that the U.K.’s freedom to go its own way outside the EU’s trade orbit had been a big advantage when negotiating with Trump.

But European diplomats privately counter that there’s unlikely to be any economist alive who would claim that a slightly better deal on tariffs with Trump could make up for the long-term destruction Brexit caused to the British economy.

Even though the U.K.’s freedom to strike its own trade deal with America did put Keir Starmer in the position of being able to score an easy goal against the EU, his government is not bragging about it. | Pool Photo by Chris Ratcliffe via EPA

According to the U.K. Treasury’s independent forecasters, the Office for Budget Responsibility, leaving the EU will reduce long-term productivity by 4 percent, while both exports and imports will be about 15 percent lower than if the U.K. had remained inside the bloc. 

In Europe, however, the unflattering U.S. trade deal has provoked some to rethink their criticism of Britain’s efforts.

Back in May, the EU scorned the outline deal the British prime minister had negotiated. “We’re not interested in this kind of agreement; what we want are meaningful discussions with the U.S.,” one EU diplomat said at the time, dismissing the British deal as “a piece of paper that has virtually no impact.”

Others went further and ruled out an agreement of the type that London had accepted. “If the U.K.-U.S. deal is what the EU gets, the U.S. can expect countermeasures from us,” Swedish Trade Minister Benjamin Dousa said on his way into a meeting of trade ministers in Brussels two months ago. 

In comments to POLITICO this week, Dousa accepted that the deal von der Leyen struck may have been as good as it was possible to get, though he was far from enthusiastic. “This agreement does not make anyone richer, but is perhaps the least worst option,” he said.

How did Starmer one-up the EU?

The U.S. talks had gone so badly that even French President Emmanuel Macron conceded at a summit last month that he would accept a U.K.-style 10-percent tariff if that was the best Trump would offer. But while Macron would rather have waited to secure better terms, he didn’t, in public at least, expect to get a worse deal than the British. 

As for Germany’s Merz, he argued that “more simply wasn’t achievable.” Yet a glance across the English Channel shows that isn’t necessarily true. 

How did Starmer achieve better terms than the EU despite representing a far smaller (and theoretically less powerful) trading partner? For one thing, he decided from the start that he wanted to fast-track talks with Trump and succeeded in getting better headline terms with the U.S. in part because talks began quickly. That’s not all Europe’s fault: For months, Trump was reluctant even to pick up the phone to von der Leyen. 

“It’s quite obvious that Trump can’t stand the EU,” said Anand Menon, professor of European politics at King’s College London. “[But] he has a soft spot for the U.K. and he obviously has a soft spot for Keir Starmer.” 

Keir Charmer

The British premier has won plaudits for the way he has kept Trump onside through a mix of charm, flattering invitations to meet royalty, and regular contact including via WhatsApp messages. 

At the same time as sticking close to the Americans, Starmer has improved the U.K.’s post-Brexit relations with the EU, soothing tensions with France, Germany and Brussels and making progress on deals with the bloc on both trade and security policy. 

“Let’s see how long that lasts,” said Menon, who is also director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank. “We already hear people in the EU grumbling about the U.K. playing both sides.” 

Britain is trying to work closely with the EU on defense cooperation, the Gaza conflict, Iran’s nuclear program, and fending off Russia. New tensions in the relationship caused by Trump’s trade war antics won’t help. 

The trade agreement Brussels reached with Donald Trump at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland wasn’t even hailed as a triumphant victory by Ursula von der Leyen. | Oliver Matthys/EPA

One potential post-Brexit flashpoint is — as it always was — the highly sensitive issue of the different rules that will apply on either side of the Northern Ireland border. 

Under the terms of Trump’s deals, businesses in the Republic of Ireland (which is in the EU) will export to the U.S. under a 15 percent tariff, while those across the border in Northern Ireland (which is part of the United Kingdom) will have a lower tariff of 10 percent. “It will just bring the issue of Brexit back to the fore,” Menon said. 

Good for Farage

In the end, even though the U.K.’s freedom to strike its own trade deal with America did put Starmer in the position of being able to score an easy goal against the EU, his government is not bragging about it — and he is unlikely to be thanked. 

British voters are more ready to associate Starmer’s Labour Party with a desire to undo Brexit (he previously backed calls for a second referendum) than as a champion of buccaneering global Britain. In order to win the election last year, Starmer pledged that he would not take the U.K. back into either the EU customs union or single market. 

Anything that seems like a victory for Brexit is more likely to favor an already potent rival — the godfather of the U.K.’s withdrawal from the EU, Nigel Farage. His Reform UK party is now consistently leading opinion polls with an eight point lead over Labour, and threatens to cut short Starmer’s desired decade in power. 

Farage’s counterparts on the populist right elsewhere in Europe have also found fuel for their anti-Brussels fire in the Trump deal. In a post on X on Monday, Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, said: “The EU has been brutally taken for a ride!”

In France, veteran far-right former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen savaged the U.S. agreement as “a political, economic, and moral fiasco,” adding: “The European Union, with its 27 member states, obtained worse conditions than the United Kingdom.”

For all Starmer’s success, it won’t win him friends in Europe when it’s used as evidence that the EU mainstream is failing to deliver for ordinary voters. As so often in the long and tortured story of Brexit, even the winners lose in the end.

Clea Caulcutt and Josh Berlinger contributed reporting from Paris.