He came suddenly out of a clear blue sky. Ensconced in his Black Hawk Marine One helicopter, and flanked by three Osprey MV22 tiltrotor military choppers, Donald Trump descended on the English countryside like an alien invader.
The engines were deafening and a dust cloud blown up from the dry paths below almost obscured the view of Chequers, Theresa May’s grace-and-favour Tudor home.
It proved to be a taste of things to come, as the President proceeded to stage an extraordinary press conference in which he generated so much noise, and kicked up so much chaff, that Britain’s so-called ‘special relationship’ with the US was left reeling.
Things had started off so well. This was the morning after the night before’s Sun interview, in which he slated her Brexit plan, backed Boris Johnson and suggested May had spurned his advice. Trump largely stuck to the script in front of him as he stood at the lectern in the un-British hot sunshine, trying to lower the temperature.
May referred to him as ‘Donald’ and the President read slowly, like a schoolboy reading a particularly tricky piece of prose, from his prepared speech. He said how delighted he was to be at Chequers, which he claimed he’d read about as a child.
Trump began by being conciliatory about Brexit and for May he needed to be. He was standing in front of the very building where exactly a week earlier the PM had secured what she thought was one of her greatest political triumphs, getting her entire Cabinet to agree to a ‘soft’ customs plan.
Yet within minutes he departed from the words in front of him, raising the idea that Britain may not actually leave the EU at all.
There was a supremely Trump-like moment when he said she had not taken up his ‘suggestion’ on Brexit. This ‘suggestion’ remains a mystery, though some present speculated that it could be the refusal to pay the UK’s bills to the EU. “I think she found it too brutal, I could fully understand why it was a little bit tough,” he said.
For good measure, he again raised the prospect that there would be no UK-US trade deal if May remained too close to Brussels. “I don’t know what you’re going to do. Perhaps the UK will have left, but whatever you do is OK with us – just make sure you can trade with us”.
Not for the first time during the event, May was firm in response. “I heard the turn of phrase the President used earlier, let me be clear: we are leaving the European Union.”