Coming home after a long spell abroad can be a surprise. Returning to London last month after nearly four years as the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief felt like escaping from a frying pan into the fire.

Fortunately, editors in London cushioned the landing by asking me to follow one story almost as wild as watching the election of Donald Trump: covering Britain’s efforts to leave the European Union.

Many experienced Guardian colleagues have already been charting this seismic upheaval for months, helping make sense of a referendum that looked particularly baffling from 3,000 miles away.

But my new job as Brexit policy editor is one of two additional roles intended to complement the expertise of our political and business teams and European specialists by looking holistically at the consequences of this historic decision.

Together with Lisa O’Carroll, who is our newly-appointed Brexit correspondent, we hope to help join the dots between what politicians are saying in London and Brussels; particularly by looking at what their decisions mean in the real world.

As an Irish citizen living in London, Lisa has a particular interested in the fate of EU nationals based here. She is also keen to explore the potential consequences of Brexit on local and business communities across the country, particularly outside London and will be working with our regional correspondents to ensure those outside the Westminster bubble are heard. Do get in touch at lisa.ocarroll@theguardian.com

For me, Britain already feels a very different country to the one I left. From the relative stability of Barack Obama’s America I watched a general election, a Scottish referendum and an EU vote that defied expectations and rewrote the rules of British politics in my absence. As Labour MP Chuka Umunna reminded me at a briefing on Wednesday: “We are a united kingdom in name only”.

But two years on the campaign trail covering the US presidential election was useful preparation too. Just as memories of the Brexit earthquake helped warn of the potential for similar anti-establishment upset in the US, I hope all that time spent talking to Trump supporters and travelling the backroads of the American rustbelt may provide some fresh perspective on the mood back here in the UK.

Just a few days into the job, it is clear this is still going to be steep learning curve. But the beauty of any new job is the excuse to pose dumb questions. A week or two of asking people to square the statements of politicians in London with those of their counterparts across the channel is reassuring only in making me realise there are currently many dumb answers out there too.

Short of an upset even bigger than the referendum result, Brexit is happening – though this week’s Commons vote perhaps marks the end of the “phoney war” phase – and over the next two or three years of attempted implementation things are going to get very real, very quickly.

My background in financial journalism, both as Guardian business editor and the industrial editor of the Financial Times, gives me a particular interest in the trade and economic consequences of leaving the single market. I have also worked at the other end of political spectrum on this question, as deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and I remember well the genuine passions ignited by Europe on both sides of the debate.

Research by the National Centre for Social Research published this week found that the Guardian had by far the most united readership on this vexed national question. Even the Sun, at the opposite end of the media, saw only 70% of its regular readers vote leave, while just 9% of Guardian readers did so. Despite the confident bluster of many Eurosceptic papers, all had ambivalent readerships.

The Guardian giving a voice to Brexit-supporting Britons may seem like an oxymoron, but we need to be more than just a voice of the “bremoaners”, as this nonetheless sizeable demographic is dismissively nicknamed. The polling research suggests our readers backed remain because they are informed and outward-looking. My guess is they want to stay that way.

For me personally, this means learning another lesson from covering Trump’s election: the importance of getting out on the road and listening to people as well as politicians. Last time I came home from America – after two and half years in New York for the FT – I was reminded how much more like each other London and the Big Apple are than the rest of their countries. This time, I hope to get out of the metropolitan bubble as much as possible and back to areas such as the West Midlands and Yorkshire, where I started out in regional newspapers.

It is easy to overstate the similarities between Trump’s election and the continued strong support for Brexit that there seems to be in Britain. Whatever one might think of Theresa May, she has not yet packed her cabinet with a junta of former generals or called for a wall to be erected at the mouth of the channel tunnel.

But there is a common problem for journalists. How do we give voice to all those who did not vote for this, while understanding the motives of those who did? It is, I hope, a challenge the Guardian is well-placed to take on.