Susan O’Keeffe: Truss must move away from Johnson’s belligerent Brexit line

If Britain’s new Brexit negotiator uses the same language and tactics as her predecessors, it will produce yet more ill-feeling and stalemate

Liz Truss brings no tough negotiating reputation to this fraught situation, but her counterpart Maros Sefcovic is an old European hand. Picture: Getty

How telling that the big dinner bash hosted by Liz Truss, the British foreign secretary, for Maros Sefcovic, the EU Brexit negotiator, included food from Wales, Scotland and England. No place for the apparently indigestible Northern Ireland. But then, Northern Ireland is well used to being treated as an outlier when it comes to the politics — and the realities — of the optimistically named United Kingdom.

That outlier status has turned to obstacle status ...