"Strategy? What strategy?"

So responds a senior civil servant when asked how plans for the future of UK trade are coming together. They then proceed to smash their coffee's foam with the back of a teaspoon aggressively.

"[The] trade strategy is basically tweeting out flag emojis."

Their frustration is not about being for or against Brexit, they stress. It is about understanding the challenge and importance of the UK getting trade right, so that businesses and jobs are protected. At the moment, that is not happening. Instead, "[there is] a distressing and embarrassing level of chaos across Whitehall on trade".

This could not be a worse time for disunity. In trade terms the UK finds itself a relative minnow caught between two big fish. The first is an increasingly protectionist US casting doubt on the world order of free trade, and the other an EU determined to avoid "cherry-picking" in the final Brexit agreement in an attempt to avoid widening its internal schisms.

In just under a year, after so-called Brexit Day - March 29 2019 - the UK will have the power to strike its own trade deals for the first time in more than 40 years. And it will need to be quick. The moment the ink is dry on a final deal with Brussels there are around 70 trade deals with non-EU countries to try to "roll over". Something once thought to be a copy and paste job has since been shown to be far more complex.