Ed Balls has been foxtrotting around the United States making friends with Donald Trump supporters and discovering that they are thoughtful, tolerant and surprisingly similar to people he knows back home.

The US Deep South is a long way from Yorkshire, where we are talking, but the one-time Labour minister and MP sees parallels between Trump voters and his former constituents.

Mr Balls, 51, has been making a TV series about Trump’s America. In last week’s episode he tried to understand the president’s love of wrestling by gamely squeezing into a Union Jack leotard so that professional wrestlers could hurl him around a ring. Tomorrow night he can be seen hauling himself over a fence while responding with a sheriff to a shooting in Louisiana