Some MPs are delighted Donald Trump will be America’s president again.
“I’m emphatic the world is a safer place now that we have Donald Trump in the White House,” Suella Braverman, the former Conservative home secretary, told the BBC.
Others are pleased, but most, from all parties, offer a rather more fruitily negative view about the president-elect’s victory, ranging from the mildly concerned to the downright horrified.
Plenty, too, ponder what Trump’s win might say about the more conventional political class being so tin-eared about the concerns of millions and millions of people that he has triumphed again.
What might that mean for British politics in the future?
It is an issue the prime minister has been alive to ever since he won the general election.
One cabinet minister I spoke to the other day waxed lyrical about plans for their connections with a Harris administration.
And what happens if Trump wins? I asked.
“Who knows” was the sentiment of their reply, albeit expressed more crudely.
That is not to say the government hasn’t put in the ground work in recent months.
It has.
But planning for a potential scenario is different from dealing with its reality – and that reality starts now.
