Officials are in despair and believe that a US-UK trade deal cannot now be saved.
Negotiations had been progressing, but had become increasingly difficult.
UK negotiators have explained that local food standards, while fairly lax, did not allow food companies to kill their customers quickly, although ill effects were allowed to accumulate over many years. They cited beer, tuna laced with mercury, and greasy food as examples.
The US negotiators accused the Brits of being very namby-pamby and nanny state about over the counter drugs. They championed the American system in which you can buy all the drugs you can afford in any pharmacy, and in which antibiotic resistance is just god’s way of telling you to invent new and even more expensive drugs.
These issues, and many others, had been chewed over and compromises found. However, at the eleventh hour, the US side had demanded - as part of the deal - presidential access to former page 3 girl Sam Fox. The president seems to have developed an unhealthy attachment to Sam Fox after seeing copies of The Sun on visits to Scotland.  He subsequently acquired a full set of back issues and keeps his favourite pictures in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
British negotiators fear that the Sam Fox issue is a deal breaker and a condition on which they cannot deliver.
A spokesman said, 'The US side clearly expects Sam Fox to look exactly the same as she did 40 years ago. But us Brits have never had the same enthusiasm as the Yanks for cosmetic surgery. Even if we could provide presidential access to a naturally aged Sam Fox, we are worried that the President might feel that he'd been fobbed off. And no-one, not even Samantha Fox, wants to fob off a US President.
Picture credit: Wix AI
