Andy Burnham reached Downing Street on 20 July, Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade. The rules of origin did not notice. What fashion pays to sell into Europe sits in origin tests, conformity checks and customs administration, and no line item has ever read a newspaper.

The trade press has spent the week asking whether the new man can repair the European relationship. The question skips a step. Four or five instruments are available. They do different things, and nobody has said which he means.

Start with the concession nobody can improve on. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement already grants zero tariffs and zero quotas on goods meeting the appropriate rules of origin. Whatever a warmer government wins in Brussels, it will not be a lower duty on a coat.

No prime minister can renegotiate a number that is already zero.

The cost lives in the condition attached to it. Where a garment fails the origin test, UKFT puts the duty at 12% for clothing, 8% for fabrics and 4% for yarns, chargeable each time the product crosses. Tariff-free trade turns out to be free only for those who can prove they deserve it.

The tests are indifferent to intent. A cotton shirt earns preference through weaving combined with making-up, including the cutting of fabric, performed in Britain or the Union. A British warehouse that relabels a shipment has done nothing the treaty recognises as production. The distribution hub, once Britain’s most persuasive argument for itself, became a cost centre on a technicality no one campaigned on.

The bill has been counted. Frontier Economics, working for Walpole, put British luxury exports to the EU 43% below where they would otherwise have stood, with fashion and accessories down 64%. Europeans did not stop admiring British clothes; the paperwork got between them.

The reset now underway excludes clothing. Brussels authorised negotiations last November on an agrifood agreement and the linking of emissions trading systems. Animals, plants, food safety and carbon permits are covered. A dress is not.

The industry, to its credit, has named an instrument. Accession to the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention would let British makers count Turkish or Moroccan fabric towards origin. The government’s own call for evidence found 79% of respondents supportive and 85% calling diagonal cumulation helpful, though 48% warned that the movement certificates PEM requires would cost more than the TCA’s simple statement of origin. It is a rare demand precise enough to be tested.

Tested, it wobbles. Researchers at the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy find PEM countries supply between 1.1% and 2.8% of the value in British exports, against roughly 10% from the EU. They conclude that joining “will not matter much when exporting to the EU”. The sector’s leading ask may be the wrong lever; it is at least a lever with a number on it, which is more than sentiment provides.

Britain has just run the control experiment anyway. The India agreement took effect on 15 July, zeroing duties of up to 12% across 1,143 textile tariff lines. Exporters promptly inherited an obligation to document the origin of fibre, yarn and fabric, since packing and ironing confer nothing. A trade agreement does not abolish paperwork. It relocates it.

The summit meant to carry Europe forward was fixed for 22 July, and postponed when the outgoing prime minister resigned. António Costa’s account of the call that followed named no new date, only a second summit in Brussels later this year. The paperwork outlasted the government that meant to reform it. Anyone writing a 2027 landed-cost model should decide which of the two to trust.