With Britain as the mother country and the US as the alliance father, Australia has a dysfunctional family. Mum has gone nuts, Dad has gone rogue. The anchors of the Anglosphere are angry and adrift, distracted by nationalism mutating to nativism.

Forfeiting Britain's influence and power in the world? It has been a long week for British PM Boris Johnson. Credit:Getty Images

Domestically, the US system is so strong and dynamic it will recover from Trump. The worrying question is whether the international system that the US created can also rebound.

The prognosis for Britain is darker. The British polity is doing lasting damage to the nation. As The Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf observed in March, the UK "has fallen into the hands of lunatics engaged in an astonishing act of national self-harm".

I’ve always loved the Poms. I was fascinated by my grandmother’s stories of growing up in London, especially her memory of German zeppelins bombing the city during World War I. I’ve lived and worked in London (as an ABC correspondent from 1983-86, and our son was born there), but I’ve never doubted I was an outsider, branded on the tongue as foreign. So this is an outsider’s sorrowful view of what Brexit is doing to the Brits.