A few polite but lukewarm messsages have come across the Atlantic assuring us that the special relationship will remain. Yes, of course it will – the UK is the USA’s key link with the EU.

Oh.

Meanwhile, Trump expresses his delight with the Brexit vote. That should be a strong clue about how intelligent it was.

Americans of good will should be concerned. They may have consoled themselves that, armed with better educations and political understanding than their forebears, enough citizens of a modern, civilised land will always come together at elections and other crisis points to ensure their country never falls into the hands of extreme politicians and extreme ideas.

They should look across the Atlantic. A concatenation of circumstances and events, dear boy, together with weak politicians and a widespread and widely encouraged contempt for politics in general, have produced a void that is constantly filled and refilled with endless dissatisfactions and febrile scapegoating – the favoured tool of the right.

In Britain, it has resulted in the country’s most astoundingly reckless and destructive political decision of the postwar era – and that even includes things like Suez. In the States, something similar could yet result in the accession of Emperor Trump.