There was something odd about Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ Brexit comment yesterday — and it wasn’t just that he felt he could dictate US trade policy for a time when he wouldn’t even be in power. The thing that struck Mr S was the phrasing of his message:
‘I think it’s fair to say that maybe some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc—the European Union—to get a trade agreement done. And the UK is going to be at the back of the queue.’
As Nigel Farage has since pointed out while raising doubts about the authenticity of Obama’s comments, Americans rarely use the word queue. Rather than ‘back of the queue’, they would say ‘end of the line’.
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