Will the Trump-supporting UK right share in his ignominy? No, it’s too dishonest for that | Polly Toynbee

Hallelujahs and hosannas have been echoing around the democratic world over the last few weeks. The White House madman is a loser. Rejoice at Serbia, Hungary, Brazil and hold our breath for Israel.

Take heart from our best historians’ encouragements. Margaret MacMillan wrote in the Observer: “And now we can hope these elections will bring an end to cruelty, naked greed, contempt for decency, and the relentless vulgarity that tries to pass for boldness and authenticity. What a difference an election can make.”

Simon Schama in the Financial Times extolled “the majesty of the people expressed in free utterance, the sovereignty of laws enacted by elected legislatures and the institutionalised impermanence of leaders”, calling it the historian’s duty to mark “moments when the tide of history really does make a turn”.

I hope they are right. But I doubt Britain, Europe or other democracies will ever again altogether trust the “majesty” of US voters who could elect Donald Trump not once but twice. How blithely they overlooked the attempted coup after the 2020 election, pardoning his rioters, showering himself and family with gold and crypto, setting his immigrant-hunting ICE thugs to arrest people, promoting scoundrels, destroying the climate, weakening the judiciary, sabotaging international institutions, while betraying Ukraine to favour “humanitarian” tyrant Putin. Those same voters will always be there.

Are you astounded that Kansas elected its first Democratic senator since 1932, two years after electing Trump? These converts’ change of heart may run no deeper than Russell Brand’s Christianity. Vital fertiliser and fossil fuels blocked in the strait of Hormuz probably touched Kansas farmers more deeply than any epiphany about the values of the founding fathers or Trump’s moral and mental defects. That Clinton-era electoral maxim, “it’s the economy, stupid”, remains an eternal verity.

What do these US elections do for UK politics? Andy Burnham already knows to the tips of his toes that what matters is the cost of living and how things feel. “That has been the issue that I have put front and centre in my first three months in Downing Street, and we’ve made moves. But I can’t get people’s cost of living pressures down until the conflict in the Middle East is resolved, and the conflict in Ukraine started by Russia,” he said at the Commonwealth summit.

I don’t know if it’s wise to admit to your voters that you are not in control, but at the mercy of the orange man in his veto hat. But saying the unsayable has done Burnham good, whether breaking the silence on Brexit harm or ending the pension triple lock. He has offered easements – £45 here, £100 there – knowing that horrendous energy bill rises and more ill-judged interest rate hikes by Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, could soon come. Burnham is right to be frank when renewed Iran warfare may send oil prices skyward. Last week’s AI market plunge will have reminded him painfully of the 2008 bank crash that he watched from his cabinet seat as Gordon Brown was swept from power. “Whatever they do, a crash takes every leader with it,” reminds Prof Rob Ford.

As US political winds sway British politics, Labour’s cheery morale beams from ear to ear. Burnham rides high, with recent figures better on growth, productivity, investment, and even wages up – though only fractionally above inflation. He is, reckons Ford, “at the peak”, by which he means as things inevitably get worse, tougher decisions will have to be made in the spending review: “Incumbency always drags leaders down.” His imminent 10-year plan may sharpen Labour’s purpose – or, as cynics say, bury problems into the never-never two elections ahead.

Labour’s great asset is Burnham’s political intelligence. But how super-blessed they are in their opposition. Faragism fades and Kemi Badenoch ignores the changes in the air. Does she not read the polls? Tory voters, as ever, want lower taxes and curbs on immigration – but not her pledges to abolish any Brexit reset or new working rights, to leave the ECHR, reintroduce grammar schools or abandon climate net zero. No surprise that only 20% of Britons think her party is ready for government.

Against the winds of change, Badenoch is no readier to rethink direction than the flotilla of rightwing commentators, Trump apologists or fellow travellers who may criticise the US president, yet always prefer him to any Democrat opponent.

Let us not forget that the Spectator’s Roger Kimball backed Trump’s rebellion against the 2020 ballot. “Trump is right not to concede”, ran the headline. Douglas Murray backed Trump in Iran, after welcoming his re-election in the Sun: “Trump isn’t like most politicians. When he says he’s going to do a thing, he actually does it.” Andrew Roberts found historical justification for Trump’s glitzy Gaza riviera plan. Boris Johnson told the Sun: “When you look back at Trump’s last term in office, there is little doubt that the world felt safer and calmer and more stable.” Only the Daily Mail columnist Andrew Neil offered a mea culpa for his Trump support: “What fools we were not to take him at his own estimation but to think he could amount to something better.”

Sustained not by public opinion but by billionaire media owners, these commentators will switch to some Maga successor, not towards moderation.

Even if a fine Democrat president repairs friendships with old allies, everything has changed. Liberal democracies now know to stick together, defending ourselves. Admire that inventive, creative and bright-brained dynamo of a nation across the Atlantic. But, now that we’ve seen the underbelly of the beast, never quite trust it again.