Theresa May’s private opinion of Donald Trump goes recorded but I doubt that she is a natural fan. Looking backwards, Margaret Thatcher put up with Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, a Commonwealth country, Tony Blair’s eagerness to be close to George W. Bush cost him European allies and took Britain into the Iraq war so some flummery could have been expected during her visit to Washington but, to my mind, Mr Trump is different. Whereas Reagan and Bush cherished the economic and security order in which Britain was a junior partner, Mr Trump threatens it. So why did Mrs May rush to visit him? Because Brexit compels Britain’s leaders to show that the country has powerful friends. The curious thing is that Brexit was supposed to be about taking back control and asserting national dignity and independence. Increasingly, that looks like a bad joke. Britain’s leaders feel that they have to prostrate themselves before a president that they find odious.

To keep businesses moving elsewhere, Britain may have to shadow EU regulations and pay into EU programmes without the chance to shape either. A fact of the modern world is that control and autonomy are not the same things. Britain is a party to about 700 treaties, a member of countless international organisations and spends billions on a nuclear deterrent unusable without America. In each of these cases Britain had traded pure self-determination for real influence so had the ability to shape its economic, security and environmental circumstances. Leaving the EU club gives us back some control (I suppose that I’m thinking about deep-water fishing policy) but requires us to trade away control in other ways. Will Britain be a country able to chart its own course in future? Watch the prime minister holding hands with Mr Trump and decide.