Now, let’s see what the blustering bluffers Johnson and Gove are made of.
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Perhaps ‘spare no effort’ means they’ll actually do something at last.
As with other sectors, musicians repeatedly asked the UK government to resolve these issues in its negotiations with the EU - and was repeatedly assured it would do so…
The trade deal was done in such a rush to avoid chaos at the ports that everything else was ignored.
Yes, and what did they end up with… chaos at the ports 
I read (listened to) the Osborne book during my Xmas break Geof. Very accurate and very depressing.
It’s just another in the long list of brexit mistakes we’re all familiar with - and there are a whole cluster around the end of the trade deal negotiations, aren’t there? - not extending the transition, believing the myth that the EU always compromises just before the deadline, realising too late that no deal actually would be worse than a bad deal, etc…
Glad you ‘enjoyed’ it John. Oborne is focused on, and seems to be doing a great job of cataloguing Johnson’s mendacity.
For me though the lying - like Trump’s - is just part and parcel of right-wing ideology, which has always involved ignoring the truth, and experts - defending prejudice and superstition and attacking rational, evidence-based policy-making (as a friend of mine put it at an academic conference a few years ago, ‘this is not evidence-based policy-making, it’s policy-based evidence-making!’).
Does Oborne set the lies and myopia of Johnson, Gove, etc, in this broader context of rightist ideology - or see it in a ‘liberal’ framework as merely a weakness of personality?
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Think it actually means, ‘no spare effort’.
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For “spare” read “make” 
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“To turn our backs on the world’s largest trading bloc, which is on our doorstep, in favour of trying to create trade deals with countries that couldn’t be further away, and have much smaller economies, is total stupidity and beyond comprehension,” he says.
“Covid has kept the Brexit issues out of the headlines, but to try and get a message across to our single-minded, short-sighted government, it needs to be in the headlines. I cannot think of one single positive benefit from Brexit, only negatives, and all my customers and contacts are of the same opinion.
“Britain used to be great but no longer,” he says, blaming Tory politicians at the top of government. “To adapt a phrase from our most famous leader, ‘Never in the field of British business has so much been destroyed for so many, by so few.’”
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Once consequence has been that Irish hauliers are avoiding the UK altogether with significant impact on ports such as Fishguard.
But I was struck by this map showing the new routes - quite accidentally it speaks volumes about exactly what we have done to ourselves.
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Holyhead is on its knees too. I travelled Rosslare to Cherbourg with Stena on the 6th. Brand new ferry which only came into service on the Dublin Holyhead route in January now redeployed to the French route. Truckers and transport companies just don’t want the Channel hassles.
It’s going to devastate jobs in the western ports - and, presumably, be something of a boon for the French ports involved. I doubt it will do Brittany Ferries any harm in terms of revenue either.
But it just re-enforces the fact that the UK is no longer much use as an EU hub.
