Sometimes in life you don’t always want to be at the front of the queue. For anyone with the surname Aardvark – and there are around a thousand such people on Facebook, one of whom, incidentally, has had it paired it with the first name Quentin – school life will have been automatically conferred with many privileges. First in line at dinner time, a peg right by the door, the pick of the board games come wet play (a phrase I must apologise for using in a column which will shortly be about Donald Trump). But for yin there must be yang, and when nurse arrives with the needle, well you’d rather be Quentin Yang than Quentin Aardvark.
And so Theresa May stands, Aardvark-like, at the front of the queue, ready to take a deep breath and plunge her snout in to the towering termite mound of Trump’s America.
She stands at the front of the line for a rollercoaster no one has ridden, completely untested, its safety certificate not even in the post. Later this week, she will strap herself in to her RAF Voyager and take off for a Washington DC that used to be a Waltzer but now looks more like Oblivion.
At least, to an extent, the devastation from two transatlantic political earthquakes has put the Special Relationship back in sync. One of the more curious realities of recent times was, in 2008, watching the left-leaning liberals of America pinning the blame for the financial crisis on the conservatives, while over here the Conservatives did the same to Labour. History could have been very different if Obama and Blair had found each other. Now, as Trump puts America First, Theresa May’s Conservatives bear every outward similarity to Britain First, so at least things will not be complicated.
So what to expect? Downing Street advisers are quietly putting out talk of a trade deal that will make it easier for Americans to work in the UK and Brits to work overseas, which you’d think might be a curious thing to follow in the wake of two seismic transatlantic political events that both had immigration at their heart.
It might make life that little bit harder for those who continue to claim the referendum result was nothing to do with race, and for that reason we look forward to Nigel Farage’s grave warnings about the Americans moving in next door, and the Boston accents on the trains out of Charing Cross. At this early stage in the delicate proceedings, it might be best not to mention the 72m black and Hispanic people with US passports.
We know that Trump is confident a deal can be done “quickly and properly.” He said so himself to Michael Gove. I mean, we also know that there were “a million and a half” people at his inauguration and that it’s the “dishonest media” that has cooked up his row with the US intelligence services (and has nothing to do with his own tweet that comparing them to Nazis), so there is no harm in taking the man at his word.
A wisdom appears to be emerging that a potential US trade deal gives the UK leverage in its negotiations with Brussels – that now more than ever we are in a stronger position to just walk away. That in a week in which both the President of the United States and the Chinese Premier made loud public proclamations about a return to protectionism, the UK has suddenly done the right thing by marching out of the world’s largest free trade zone, right on its doorstep. That a UK running in to the arms of an international joke is something our European neighbours will fear and not merely laugh at.