Now Trump has gone home, can Britain stop cringing?

What has gone under-mentioned as this country emerges blinking from a state visit for Donald Trump in which, somehow, everything that was meant to go right has, and everything that could have gone wrong was dodged, is quite how lowly everyone had to make themselves to get us there.

- IMOGEN WEST-KNIGHTS

From the moment Sir Keir Starmer handed the US president a letter from the King when he visited the White House in February, the word that has sprung to mind for many has been “cringe”.

There was the moment at which the prime minister groped - twice, desperately — for his wife Victoria’s hand outside Chequers; there were Rachel Reeves’s dead eyes as she asserted how much Britain and the US “like each other” at Lancaster House, and Trump giving Starmer the kind of back slap a football coach reserves for his most improved under-12 player as he condemned Hamas, but not Israel.

The visit was, by all accounts, a success. The UK has secured a £150bn investment from US tech firms, although how much of that money is going to go towards AI-ing people out of their jobs is no doubt something they’d rather we didn’t think about. And nobody managed to get near enough to Trump to embarrass him with evidence of how low most people in this country’s opinion of him is.