You can relax now. A saviour has risen from these streets. Thanks to the UK-Australian free trade agreement announced on Tuesday – the first such deal to be negotiated from scratch since Brexit – the country’s gross domestic product will increase by 0.02% over the next 15 years. Just another 250 or so similarly hugely advantageous deals to be struck to offset the loss in GDP following the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. Not that Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, chose to dwell on any of the possible downsides when she made her statement on the Australian deal in the Commons. Rather, she was keen to parade the agreement that had been concluded by Boris Johnson and the Aussie prime minister, Scott Morrison, in just about an hour over a boozy lunch in Downing Street as the gold standard by which all future trade deals should be measured. It had been a win-win for both sides, she insisted. We would be able to sell more whisky and cars tariff-free and the Australians would be able to export more swimwear and biscuits. We can only look forward to Boris posing in some budgie smugglers at the next meeting of the G7. Oh yes, Truss added as an afterthought. The Aussies would also be able to flog Britain a whole load more beef and lamb but that wasn’t the big deal everyone was making it out to be, because there was a large potential market for British meat among the emerging middle-classes of Pacific rim countries. The idea that Welsh lamb chops might become an iconic status symbol was quite a stretch. None of this went down well with Emily Thornberry, the shadow international trade secretary. The difference between Thornberry and Truss couldn’t be more marked. Where Liz is barely a 2D cartoon cutout – she gives the appearance of being emotionally and intellectually inert – Emily is never less than full-on. A frustrated actor, who is determined to make the most of her increasingly rare moments in the limelight under Starmer’s leadership of the Labour party. Thornberry began by observing that she would have to reserve judgment on the deal as a whole until the economic impact assessment had been published, though she hoped it was better than the Japan deal Truss had negotiated that had left us worse off than when we were in the EU. But she did want to point out that the new deal would allow Australia to export – tariff-free – 60 times more beef next year than it had last year. And sheep quotas had risen massively, too. What was worse was that there were 10 areas in which Australian farmers had lower health standards – including the use of antibiotic growth hormones and 48-hour transportation without food and water – so British farmers were going to be competitively disadvantaged. Something Truss had previously assured the house could never happen. She had also said she would run rings round her Aussie counterparts, and yet all the Australian negotiators were now saying they couldn’t believe what they had managed to get past the Brits and that the UK was a soft touch. Maybe there was a reason most trade deals took longer than an hour to conclude. Truss first responded by saying Thornberry was the shadow minister against international trade – it fell flat, as do all gags she attempts – before turning her trade deal into a culture war. Labour and the SNP were against the deal simply because they didn’t like Brexit. Some of us, though not her, can remember Truss spinning for remain in the press room during an EU referendum debate – Brexit will never happen, she said – before reinventing herself as a hardcore Eurosceptic. After that, the debate rather fizzled out. Truss insisted that UK farmers were talking themselves down when they said the deal would put some of them out of business. Presumably they just need to be a bit more enthusiastic and positive about their farming. She also denied that Australian agricultural health rules were lower than the UK’s, even though they demonstrably are. And she just ignored a question about the effect on the UK’s carbon footprint of increased trade Down Under. She seemed to take it as read that the 35,000 tonnes of cattle would be swimming the 9,000 miles and would be taking their chances with the asylum seekers at Dover. At business questions, the shadow leader of the house, Thangam Debbonaire, raised the question of why the prime minister had kept in post a minister he thought of as “completely fucking hopeless”. Jacob Rees-Mogg waved her away dismissively. Matt Hancock was a genius, he said. As was Boris, both for having achieved so little at the G7 and for having failed to close the borders sooner to stop the Delta variant. Oh lucky us to have the likes of Johnson, Hancock and Truss in our hour of need.