Trump calls it peace. The tankers are still at anchor.

At a closing press conference at the G7 in Évian today, Donald Trump said his agreement with Iran "achieves everything we set out to accomplish" — ending the war, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon. It is the language of a finished thing. The document behind it is not finished.

What was signed on Monday, electronically, by Trump and Vice-President JD Vance, with Iran's parliament speaker signing for Tehran, is a memorandum of understanding: a first phase, not a treaty. Trump said as much today, in the same breath as the victory lap — it is "not final", and if Iran "misbehaves", he warned, the bombing resumes. A formal signing is pencilled for Friday, with a fresh round of talks in Switzerland and a sixty-day clock on the harder questions, uranium enrichment among them. The war began with US and Israeli strikes at the end of February. Four months on, it has paused, not ended.

For the British reader the test is not the wording but the water, because the water sets the price of a tank of petrol and a unit of gas. And the water is barely moving. Trump says ships are already crossing; the shipping industry says not yet. The chief executive of Mitsui OSK Lines, one of the world's largest tanker operators, told the Financial Times his vessels will not transit until the strait is proven safe in practice. The Hong Kong-based Caravel Group has around a dozen ships anchored in the Gulf, ready but holding, its chief executive waiting for "thirty days of incident-free transits". A US military advisory still lists the blockade as in place pending the deal's execution. Clearing mines, reassuring insurers and resting exhausted crews takes weeks, not headlines.

That gap, between declared open and actually flowing, is why relief at the pump lags relief in the markets. Oil has already taken the good news: Brent settled at its lowest since early March on Monday, in the low $80s a barrel, and held there on Tuesday. The barrel reprices in a morning; the forecourt and the energy cap follow over weeks, and only if the calm holds. This morning's UK inflation figure, 2.8 per cent with transport and fuel the main upward push, is the war arriving in a British number on a delay. The Bank of England's response to it is the economy desk's story, below.

Britain's part in all this was to watch. The settlement was brokered by Washington, with Tehran, over the heads of the European powers at whose summit it was being celebrated; Emmanuel Macron's offer of fighter jets and an aircraft carrier to help patrol the strait was waved away as possibly unneeded. For a country that still buys much of its energy at world prices, being a spectator at the table is its own form of exposure. The deal may yet hold. A British household's bill will report back, slowly, on whether it did.