Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump | Getty Westminster Sketch A very British debate on Donald Trump You want charisma? Excitement? Tension? Best look elsewhere.

LONDON — If there’s one thing the rest of the world can’t get enough of, it’s British people explaining to them that they’re wrong. And no one more so than American conservatives, who are only too eager to hear from the mother country about how they should be running things.

That, at least, appeared to be the theory behind Monday’s parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall, held in response to a petition signed by more than half a million people calling for Donald Trump to be banned from the U.K. because of comments he made about banning Muslims from the United States (and another far smaller petition urging MPs not to be so bloody stupid).

The Donald may be leading in the Republican primaries, may have a packed schedule of rallies and debates and Twitter sideswipes, but he would surely drop everything to spend three hours listening to MPs at Westminster explain why he was wrong about Muslims. And as for his supporters — why, all it would take to turn them round would be a pious lecture from an obscure Labour MP about the virtues of multiculturalism.

There was, in short, more than a whiff of Operation Clark County in the air — the Guardian’s disastrous attempt in 2004 to patronize vital rural voters from the swing state of Ohio into voting for John Kerry rather than George W. Bush. Especially since the format of the debate consisted of a series of MPs urging the Home Secretary to ban Trump or not, even though a) she wasn’t there and b) even if she was, she wouldn’t have paid any attention.

Trump was being taken with rather more seriousness than he probably expected — or deserved.

Annoyingly, however, those of us expecting egotistical grandstanding were rather disappointed. The tone was set at the start when a man with a gray beard read out the wording of the petitions from a piece of paper, very slowly, while informing MPs that various names had been struck off. The drama! There then followed a lengthy list of other people who have been excluded from the U.K. It felt like the whole event was, certainly compared to The Donald himself, lacking a certain pizzazz.

No laughing matter

As proceedings went on, a ghastly suspicion began to dawn. MPs were taking this seriously. They actually thought it mattered. Not all MPs, I grant you — more a selection of parliament’s tweediest, stuffiest and most self-satisfied specimens. There were even some hairpieces on show that The Donald himself would have been proud of. But still: there were carefully considered speeches, references to a House of Commons briefing note produced for the occasion. Someone even quoted Thomas More’s "Utopia."

“I draw the line at freedom of speech when it actually imports violent ideology, which is what I feel is happening,” said one MP. “If we only allow free speech for those we agree with, is that free speech at all?” rebutted another. Several Muslim MPs pointed out that, even though they would be covered by Trump’s ban, they would not be calling for his exclusion: one, quoting Martin Luther King, pronounced that “hate is too great a burden to bear.”

In short, Trump was being taken with rather more seriousness than he probably expected — or deserved. There was the occasional passionate call for his exclusion — largely from members of the Scottish National Party, scrambling to dissociate themselves from their former ally.

But the vast majority, far from wanting to keep Trump out, wanted to bring him in. There were enough invitations for him to come to particular constituencies, to tour the mosques and synagogues and see the marvels of multiculturalism in action (over, of course, a traditional British curry), to fill his calendar for years. Sarah Wollaston, whose patch as an MP covers Dartmouth, where the Pilgrim Fathers stopped off on their way to America, extended her invitation not just to Trump but to everyone in the U.S.

If anyone from America was indeed tuning in (and there were reports that C-SPAN had cleared its schedules), they would have been rather puzzled. There were awful lots of references to “Sir Roger” and “Sir David” (the august figures chairing the debate), and certain lovely examples of English idiom: Trump was, one MP pronounced, “a wazzock.”

Some MPs pointed out that if he wins, he may not be best pleased by the debate. But at that point, I imagine we’ll all have rather larger problems.

At times, given the lack of raw charisma on show, it did seem a little like an assembly of Prince Charles impersonators, each solemnly reassuring the others that it really was quite appalling. “I don’t think a debate like this calls for flippancy,” one MP chided another when he made a (very weak) joke about roasting Trump rather than roasting beef.

It was, in short, the anti-Trump debate — not anti in the sense of being critical of him, although everyone dutifully put on record their condemnation of his views — as being its exact opposite, like matter and anti-matter.

This wasn’t the politics of rallies and banners, helicopters and attack ads — it was lots of cautious, boring, slightly pretentious people going on and on in a committee room about free speech, integration and of course diversity (which was, inevitably, “vibrant”).

Someone would politely ask if they could interrupt, and the speaker would politely let them. It didn’t set any hearts racing, and in the grand scheme of things it didn’t really matter that much. But then, as Donald Trump proves on a daily basis, excitement in politics isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Robert Colville, a regular contributor to POLITICO, is the author of “The Great Acceleration,” which will be published in April.