“We meet tonight in a world transformed,” sighed Theresa May at the opening of her Guildhall speech. Too right, she thought to herself. Normally the lord mayor’s banquet was a total blingfest, but compared with Donald Trump’s lift doors it looked like a food bank for bankers. When the new US president had been elected the previous week, it hadn’t occurred to her just how special the “special relationship” was going to be.

Ninth. She had only been the ninth world leader the president-elect had bothered to ring. It was humiliating. What’s more, she wouldn’t even have made it into the top 10 if Angela Merkel hadn’t been sulking in her bathroom, refusing to take any calls, and someone had not explained to Trump that Piers Morgan wasn’t prime minister. Then there was bloody Nigel Farage running around acting as if he was foreign secretary. Wasn’t Boris enough of a clown already? A world transformed indeed.

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The prime minister glanced down at her script. She had been going to tell everyone a few home truths about Brexit being a lot trickier than she had imagined and that the economy would be in for a bit of a bumpy ride over the next few years, but all that suddenly seemed too downbeat. Too austere. In this post-truth world, where the Vote Leavers could win a referendum by telling more lies than the Vote Remainers, and where a narcissistic sociopath could become US president by saying anything his supporters wanted to hear, why should she be the only politician left who bothered to tell the truth?

She slowly and deliberately ripped up her speech, scattering the fragments like confetti, and began to ad lib. “Britain is going to lead the way in globalisation,” she said. “But we’re going to have a very special kind of progressive, liberal globalisation that makes sure none of the people at the bottom of the heap gets left behind.” Theresa felt a reckless thrill. Surely everyone must realise there was no magic wand to globalisation, as Trump would find out soon enough when, having deported the 3 million Mexicans who might have done the job, he tried to persuade white working-class Americans to build his 2,000-mile wall on wages of $8 a day.



But no one did realise. Or if they did, they didn’t show it. No one expected a politician to talk sense any more. Most of her audience were more interested in checking their mobiles to find out what Nigel was going to do next. Emboldened by the indifference with which she was being received, Theresa went on to talk about free markets. So what if Trump was an old-school protectionist? So what if Britain now had just over two years to come to a trade deal with the EU or face playing by WTO rules? So long as she said free trade confidently enough and ignored the obvious counterfactuals, she had a chance of getting away with it.

On and on she went, only occasionally lapsing into unintended moments of veracity about the pig’s ear of Brexit. But even these did not jar too much. It didn’t matter if most of what she was saying was nonsense, so long as it was good, Panglossian triumphalist nonsense. “Britain is leading the way …” she concluded. But what was it leading the way in? “Britain is leading the way in fighting terrorism. Britain is leading the way in making a globalisation that works for everyone.” Britain was leading the way in everything, really.

There’s a tradition at the lord mayor’s banquet that the speaker is slow-handclapped on the way in to dinner. It saves time that way.