Over the course of President Trump’s state visit, we can expect lots of investments by the giants of American industry to be unveiled. Microsoft will announce $30 billion (£22 billion) of investment in new artificial intelligence hubs and tech infrastructure. Google will pump £5 billion into AI in Britain, which presumably means getting some robots to sit in the British Library reading room for a few months until all the content has been scraped. Perhaps by the end of the week, even McDonald’s will have announced plans for a new food court on the A30. But for all the celebration, there will be no progress on the only deal that matters – and that will prove very expensive for the taxpayer indeed.

Most of the ‘deals’ announced on occasions such as this week’s state visit by Trump involve a

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