Theresa May’s sycophancy before this appalling, childish, bigoted, proto-fascist clown – at least in public: viz. her speech last night in Philadelphia – demonstrates just how low Brexit has pulled us down. Blair could also be said to have acted as America’s ‘poodle’, but at least he retained a modicum of dignity. May’s language was very clever, flattering Trump, and pushing all his erogenous verbal buttons: words and phrases like ‘leadership’, ‘Reagan’, ‘Thatcher’, ‘patriotism’, ‘work’, ‘family’, ‘power restored to the people’, ‘Iran’s malignant influence’, Britain’s and America’s ‘making of the modern world’, his ‘great election victory’, and ‘as dawn breaks on a new era of American renewal’. Trump must have loved that last one. Indeed, he could almost have written the speech himself. (‘It was huge. Terrific. Believe me.’) OK, so she didn’t express approval of his stance on more sensitive issues like water-boarding, or ‘The Wall’, or pussy-grabbing, or women’s reproductive rights; and it’s just possible that she will raise these questions, critically, in her more private conversation with him this afternoon. Let’s hope she takes a long spoon with her. But what she has said up to now has already demeaned her; and so by association the rest of us, her compatriots – and all because of the pathetically weak position Brexit has put Britain in. She needs this US-UK ‘trade deal’. Watch out when its details are revealed (probably not yet), and we find that European-British health and safety laws, labour regulations, ownership rules for public utilities, and the general principle of democratic accountability for businesses, have all been repealed to please the American side. What – you Brexiteers – will become of ‘taking back control’ then?