Since the 1990s I’ve been interpreting events in Britain for an American audience through my journalism. Sometimes it’s easy: London’s glorious renaissance, Tony Blair’s rise. Sometimes it’s less easy: the strangeness of a “special relationship” where one side cares too much and the other too little, the post-imperial hangover that courses through British life.
And sometimes it’s hard: the puzzle of Brexit, the precipitous downfall of the Conservative party. It helps that for Americans still living through the Donald Trump saga, nothing is outside the realm of possibility any more. It also helps when I explain to them that those two latest chapters of British history are connected.
