Last week, in the wake of Brexit, a guy waylaid me near my apartment building. Was I voting in New York’s congressional primaries, he wanted to know, flourishing flyers. “I can’t,” I explained, “I’m English.” There was a pause. “Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry. My condolences.”

Brexit has broken Brand Britain. It’s not just the pound that has plummeted since 24 June; there has also been a rapid devaluation of our international image. Once upon a time – like, three weeks ago – a “British” accent was an asset in the US. It connoted class, culture and cosmopolitanism. Now it conveys parochialism, priggishness and poor political decisions.

For someone who is an expat in America, Brexit has felt like having a very public, but sort of embarrassing, death in the extended family. Everyone I come across seems to feel a need to acknowledge what happened without really knowing what to say. (With the exception of one stranger in a lift who heard me discussing Brexit with another Brit and promptly started Amerisplaining. It’s not about racism, she informed us between floors; it’s about pride and sovereignty. ’Kay. Thanks. Bye.) Mostly, though, Americans clock my accent and simply say “Brexit” pityingly. It has basically become shorthand for: “Hi, how are you? Sorry your country failed.”

Then there’s American media smuggery. Despite needing some frenzied post-referendum Googling to realise Brexit wasn’t a breakfast cereal and Brussels wasn’t (just) a sprout, some US commentators seem to have become overnight EU aficionados. Others have relished the chance to give Britain a serving of the scorn we have heaped on it over Donald Trump. Brexit voters missed the lesson of 1776, trumpeted the Washington Post. Great Britain or “Little England”?, asked the New York Times. British Lose Right to Claim That Americans are Dumber, announced the New Yorker. It’s hard to escape a sense of stateside schadenfreude, compounded by the referendum results being announced shortly before 4 July, the 240th anniversary of the US’s own, rather more triumphant, Amerexit.

British politics rarely cause so much interest in the US. Last year’s general election, for example, passed most Americans by. Brexit is different for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s more exciting to watch the world burn rather than to see the democratic process slowly chugging along. “British politics turns into a fast-paced TV drama,” enthused CNN. Then there are the populist parallels with Trump’s ascendancy and worries that the June result foreshadows a November Trumpocalypse. Finally, there’s that schadenfreude again. A suspicion that the US has been sneered at for the past 240 years by an island that lost an empire but retained a superiority complex. A sense that the veil has been lifted and Britain has nothing left to feel superior about.

“In the Jane Austen novel of international life, we were supposed to be Marianne, the one with all the feelings,” said the Washington Post, in a display of post-Brexit sensibility. “You were supposed to be Elinor, the sensible one … We read all these books of yours about people in the countryside drinking tea for hours on end because we thought you knew better than we did!”

Being British used to have a cachet in the US – which Brexit has now destroyed. We’re no longer Elinor, the sensible one. In the Jane Austen novel of international life, we are Fanny Price: the throwback no one respects.

Which is a shame, because Brand Britain was doing so well. A 2013 study found that Britain’s international image had significantly improved over the past decade, with the 2012 London Olympics being a substantial catalyst. Pre-Olympics, the US saw the UK as “traditional”, “unapproachable” and “restrained”. Post-Olympics, it was “kind”, “approachable” and more “caring”.

The unprecedented stateside success of Downton Abbey and Sherlock, and the sudden availability of wider British programming via Netflix, helped spur major appreciation for British TV, culture and slang in the past few years. Harry Potter, of course, became synonymous with Britain for a generation of Americans who grew up on the books. Buzzfeed even helpfully explained Brexit to befuddled Americans in Harry Potter terms.

Britain has also been seriously investing in its brand, pouring £113.5m into the GREAT Britain campaign, launched in 2012. This was the UK’s most ambitious marketing effort ever and the first really unified approach to promoting its image abroad. It largely consisted of British icons such as Bond, Beckham, Branson and Paddington Bear (an immigrant from Peru) alongside proclamations such as, “SPORT IS GREAT BRITAIN, CULTURE IS GREAT BRITAIN, INNOVATION IS GREAT BRITAIN”. All in block capital letters, of course, so the foreigners could understand.

The irony of the GREAT campaign is that while the British government was going to such expense and effort to ensure the rest of the world understood its brand, it had no idea what Britain had actually become. A country divided and deflated by austerity; a kingdom united more by hate than by great. Perhaps the government should have spent less time worrying about its reputation abroad and more about its reality at home. Perhaps it should have focused more on its infrastructure than its image. Not that Britain should now scrap the marketing campaign entirely, however. With the pound depreciating so drastically, the government can quite truthfully tell American tourists that BRITAIN IS GREAT VALUE.