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THE urgency with which Britain’s Brexiteer elite has scrambled to cosy up to Donald Trump in the weeks building up to today’s inauguration has been something to behold. Leading the way was Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader, flashing a mile-wide grin as he posed for souvenir snaps with the president-elect. Last week Michael Gove made the same pilgrimage. The former justice secretary, now writing for the Times, could barely conceal how impressed he was by America’s macho new helmsman: beaming for a goofy, thumbs-up photo and writing up the encounter in excruciating terms: “Mr Trump’s conversation flows like a river in spate, overwhelming interruptions and objections, reflecting the force of nature that is the man.”

The reflex goes all the way to the top: Theresa May greeting the November election result without the reserved language of, say, Angela Merkel. On January 15th her government infuriated other EU members by boycotting the Middle East peace conference in Paris to curry Mr Trump’s favour. In her big Brexit speech on Tuesday the prime minister hailed the president-elect’s talk of a prompt trade deal as an early triumph for her “Global Britain” agenda. After a week in which the tone of British-European relations has greatly soured, Mr Trump’s enthusiasm for Brexit and hostility to the EU is touted as a great boost for Britain in its coming exit talks. Perhaps, it is suggested, America’s new president will open the door to a new golden age of Anglo-Saxon friendship.

These instincts are understandable. The leader of the world’s only superpower cannot just be ignored or spurned, whatever his politics. Britain’s close cultural, defence and security ties with the United States mean London can play a special role in binding the voluble and suggestible new inhabitant of the White House into the rules-based global order. It can steer him towards sensible positions on subjects like NATO and Russia. Perhaps, to invoke the old dictum, it can be Greece to his Rome.

The thing is, Britain’s leaders risk going beyond engagement and realpolitik to something more craven, something closer to knee-jerk sycophancy. They risk overestimating the advantages and underestimating the risks of proximity to him.

Mr Trump’s priorities are not complicated. Brexiteers should expect his talk of admiring Brexit and revering the Queen to melt on first contact with the realities: Britain is not America’s most important trade partner and for four of the past five years has sold more to America than it has bought from it; including lots of stuff that could theoretically be made within America’s borders by American workers. So far Mr Trump has concentrated his protectionist rabble-rousing on Germany (which he thinks should buy more American cars) and most of all China. Even if Britain has been spared the verbal barbs, its surplus relationship with the United States puts it in a similar practical position as those countries. An early sign of the disparity between Mr Trump's words and priorities came during his chat with Mr Gove. His interviewer presented an unambiguous invitation to pronounce Britain “front of the queue” for a trade deal. The president-elect flanneled: “I think you're doing great”. It was later reported that he wants his trade negotiators to focus on NAFTA. When he says “America First”, he means it.

There is a broader point here. Mr Trump’s world is one of muscular conflicts of interest; brute, zero-sum tests of leverage, self-confidence and guile. Sycophancy and flattery may buy one a place in his court but the evidence suggests it comes at the cost of real influence. If he is solicitous towards Vladimir Putin it is not because the Russian president sucks up to him (in fact his public pronouncements have been cooly non-committal) but because he is a strongman who seems to get his way. Mr Trump admires that. If he is angry about China, he also commends its leaders’ canny policies. In other words, he respects those who stand up for their interests. This is the main message of “The Art of the Deal”: “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you're dead”; “You have to believe in yourself or no one else will”; “When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.” All of which begs the question: could the new president’s early encounters with Britain’s fawning establishment turn out to have made him a less, not more, accommodating partner in the long term? Why ever cede ground to a government that instinctively gives it up for free?

While the potential advantages of clinging to Mr Trump may be smaller than they first appear, the possible disadvantages are probably greater. Unchallenged, he seems minded to threaten many of the hardest-won achievements of recent British foreign policy: welcoming the disintegration of the EU (Steve Bannon, his adviser, reportedly wants to build closer links with continental parties promoting that), weakening NATO, applauding Mr Putin’s adventurism, ripping up climate-change accords and the nuclear deal with Iran. Britain has shed blood and treasure in pursuit of these goals. Its exports to the rest of the EU are worth £171bn, compared with the £45bn value of those to America. To cheer on or turn a blind eye to such vandalism in the spirit of continental one-upmanship would be utterly short-sighted, doing diplomatic and economic damage that would far outlast the four- or eight-year span of Mr Trump’s presidency. Let Britain not become Europe’s answer to Chris Christie.

This is not to say Mrs May should seek conflict with Mr Trump. Far from it. The prime minister was right to send two chiefs of staff to New York last month to meet the transition team. She is also right to visit Washington, D.C. early in his presidency (the dates will be made public soon after today’s inauguration). But she should do so while clarifying and sticking to certain red lines; principles by which she intends to conduct the partnership and ensure it serves Britain’s interests. Mrs Merkel’s response to the election result—looking forward to cooperation “on the basis” of “common values”—points to the conditional sort of friendship London should seek. If we know one thing about America’s colourful new president, it is that he does not do long-term alliances or sentimental friendships. He does case-by-case deals. This transactional world, his world, will now circumscribe the transatlantic relationship. And in this world it is better to be respected than liked.

ON THE morning of January 24th the Supreme Court ruled that Britain’s government has to put Article 50 (the formal two-year process by which Britain will leave the European Union) to a vote in parliament. It should never have come to this. Last summer Brexiteers won the EU referendum by pledging to return sovereignty to Westminster. It was shabby of Theresa May to try to bypass legislators—and a strategic misjudgment to waste time by appealing December’s ruling by the High Court, which the Supreme Court has now straightforwardly upheld.

Some detect an establishment stitch-up: Iain Duncan Smith accuses the judges of telling parliament what it should do. On this (like so much else) the welfare secretary is wrong. Sensible Brexiteers are tellingly welcoming the judgment, the essence of which is that the executive’s “royal prerogative” does not empower it to overrule the 1972 act taking Britain into the EU. The result is a victory for parliamentary democracy and a credit to Gina Miller (pictured above), the businesswoman who bravely brought the case in the first place (she has been showered with death threats for her troubles).

The ruling is unlikely to prevent Mrs May from triggering Article 50 by her self-imposed deadline: the end of March. She is expected to put a narrow, single-clause (and thus fairly amendment-proof) bill to parliament imminently. Scottish National Party MPs and a handful of Labour ones are expected to vote against it but there is no question of it not clearing the House of Commons. There is a higher (but still sub-50%) chance that the Lords will attempt to frustrate the bill, but at most they will delay its progress. Crucially, the court’s judgment does not give governments in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland a veto.

What the ruling will do is make Britain’s constitutional tensions creak and groan like never before. The very fact that it was necessary spoke to the ambiguities created by the absence of a written constitution. The prospect of even a minority of Lords voting against the result of the referendum will highlight the arbitrary character of the unelected upper house. Whether MPs vote as their constituents did (some Labour MPs with seats that strongly voted Leave have already indicated they will vote against the bill) will probe the limits of representative principles. The debates may force MPs to stipulate what sort of final Brexit deal they would (and would not) vote for at the end of the Article 50 process, when the outcome of Mrs May’s efforts in Brussels will go before both houses.

Most of all the ruling illustrates the peril facing the union. The response from Nicola Sturgeon was ominous: “it’s becoming clearer by the day that Scotland’s voice is simply not being heard or listened to within the UK.” It is “becoming ever clearer” that a new independence referendum is needed, she added. In Wales, too, it could stoke demands for more autonomy. Then there is Northern Ireland, where EU membership is integral to the already-fragile peace settlement and where Mrs May’s “hard Brexit” threatens to impose a hard border. That this should now go ahead with the say-so of Westminster, but not Stormont, will surely aggravate the sectarian divide further.

All of which means it is increasingly hard to imagine Britain holding together without a new, more federal model involving some degree of political reform. As I wrote in my column in December:

Britain’s unwritten constitution runs on deference to steadily accumulated precedent. Brexit will create rifts and ambiguities for which no clear precedent exists, and such a volume and tangle of them that attempting to “muddle through”—that is, botch together case-by-case settlements—could result in paralysis or disintegration. Better, surely, to confront all the interlocking quandaries in one big public discussion leading to reforms and perhaps a written constitution. They say Britain avoided the “constitutional moments” of continental Europe and America because it experienced no post-Enlightenment revolution (Charles I lost his head in 1649). But Britain may now be approaching such a moment whether it likes it or not.

TONY BLAIR’S speech on Brexit on the morning of February 17th attracted a predictable storm of derision. Today the former prime minister serves as a sort of Rorschach test for whatever irks the viewer: to the left he stands for free-market capitalism and war, to the right he stands for a hyper-metropolitan internationalism, to some of his former acolytes he stands for how not to secure one’s political legacy after leaving politics. In parts of Westminster and Fleet Street voicing nuanced opinions about Mr Blair meets with a mix of bafflement and distaste, like ordering veal at a vegan restaurant.

To be sure, some of the criticism is valid. Mr Blair presided over the build-up to Britain’s financial and economic crisis and the failure of the post-invasion period in Iraq. His globe-trotting, pro-globalisation breeziness clashes with the prevailing mood among electorates in much of the West. His business activities since leaving Downing Street (ten years ago this June, believe it or not) have done his domestic reputation significant harm.

Yet the shame of all this is that it detracts from the many things Mr Blair says that are worth heeding. He may have been out of British politics for a while—that mid-Atlantic accent does not lie—but he remains the most successful British politician of the past two decades. To read some of his critics you would think his record, leading a previously unelectable party to three strong election victories, was achieved by pure fluke or by casting some sort of spell on an electorate that would never ordinarily vote for him. Whisper it softly, but perhaps the former prime minister is a better strategist, a more expansive thinker and operator, than these infantile interpretations allow.

That came across in his speech this morning. You would not know it from the spasms of pearl-clutching Brexiteer apoplexy (“how DARE he?!”), but Mr Blair’s message was not anti-democratic. Quite the opposite. “Yes, the British people voted to leave Europe,” he acknowledged. “And I agree the will of the people should prevail. I accept that there is no widespread appetite to re-think.” To read this as denial or a call for the summary dismissal of the referendum result is strange indeed. Instead Mr Blair set out frankly, accurately and crisply the realities and contradictions that today’s political leaders prefer to sweep under the carpet, or refer to only opaquely: people did vote on Brexit “without knowledge of the full terms”; its execution will starve other public priorities, like the health service, of government capacity and cash; it will imperil the union. Voters may change their views; it is their right to do so; it is up to politicians, if they think the country is making a terrible mistake, to make that case.

Implicit in the fury these points have generated is the dismal notion, beloved of autocrats, that to try to change the electorate’s opinions through reasoned argument is to disregard its previous electoral judgments. “Erdogan was elected by the people, so to criticise him is to patronise and disrespect the people” say the Turkish president’s propagandists in Ankara; “Brexit was voted for by the people, so to criticise it is to patronise and disrespect the people” say the Brexit purists in London (funnily enough, the apposite vote-share in both cases was 52%). The correct response to the fallacy is always this: “If you really trust your arguments and the electorate’s judgment, why fume and fret when your opponents try to change minds?” This would have been just as true had the result of the referendum been different, which is why I argued before June 23rd that, if the Remain campaign won, it should live on to keep making and remaking its case to respond to fresh challenges. After all, referendums often intensify the debates they purport to settle.

The fairest opposition to Mr Blair’s gambit comes from keen Remainers who fear that such polarising interventions make it harder for them to win a hearing. It is easy enough to sympathise: if you want to be in a position to reverse or soften Brexit when, in a year or so, the public mood changes, you do not admit as much now; instead you align with voter opinion and let your public positions evolve in lockstep with it.

But the logic behind this—pro-European arguments must be modest, self-effacing and most of all passive to succeed—does not have a great record. It governed the backdrop to the referendum, the failed Remain campaign and subsequent efforts to nudge Britain towards a soft Brexit. David Cameron felt the only way to contain the Europe issue was to make semi-regular, stepwise concessions to Euroscepticism, rather than confronting it. That approach culminated in his referendum commitment in 2013 and begot a Remain campaign too timid to make the positive case for British engagement in Europe: the label “Project Fear” stuck for a reason. Since their defeat many pro-Europeans have kept conceding ground: no second referendum, an end to freedom of movement, prosperity and the future of the union as secondary priorities. The result has been not a Brexit that balances the views of the 48% and the 52% but the hardest of hard Brexits: “Brexit at all costs”, as Mr Blair rightly put it. After ten years in which this endlessly compromising, ground-giving brand of British pro-Europeanism has piled failure upon failure, it is hardly unreasonable of the former prime minister to suggest a change of strategy.

The question is: is Mr Blair the right figurehead? Here the despairing Remainers have a point. Fairly or not, he is a divisive figure. Moreover, he is a distant one. His speech was given in the slick, controlled environment of Bloomberg’s European headquarters; a strange backdrop for the launch of a campaign of persuasion aimed at voters far from the City of London, many of whom resent its glittering wealth. Mr Blair’s other recent interventions in British politics have been similar: speeches delivered in Britain between trips to far-flung parts of the globe, seemingly written at 40,000 feet and thus hampered, despite their perspicacious arguments, by an aura of detachment.

Which puts the former prime minister at a fork in the road. Either he can step back out of the political limelight, and let fresher, less freighted public figures take forward his call for voters to “rise up” against the costs and dislocations of Brexit. Or, if he really wants to bring his formidable experience and skill to the task, he can clamber into the trenches and become a full participant in Britain’s domestic political contest once more: joining the melee in such a way that he gradually remakes his public image, wins credit (however grudging) for re-engaging and builds the case for a change of course on Brexit, week-by-week, battle-by-battle. In practice that means going head to head with his critics: appearing on Question Time, hosting radio phone-ins, shooting from the hip in television interviews and on social media, appearing at town-hall events, travelling around the country meeting people who voted for Brexit. Resetting his relationship with the British public, in other words. Let’s be frank: he would take a tsunami of personal abuse and media scorn in the process. His approval ratings are subterranean and it is treated as a fact in Westminster that his reputation is unsalvageable. But some political “facts” are eroded by time and events: the unelectability of the Tories, the Liberal Democrats’ post-coalition doom, the impossibility of a vote for Brexit. Perhaps Mr Blair’s ostracism can go the same way.

I fear, however, that he will pick the third-best option: opting decisively for neither of these two approaches and instead trying to compromise between them. He will put lots of money into a glossy but slightly otherworldly political institute, give occasional speeches at stage-managed venues, write op-eds for broadsheet papers, perhaps even endorse political candidates. He will be sufficiently involved in politics to be a liability for other pro-Europeans and liberals, but will float too far above the fray to change public perceptions and perhaps become an asset to them. He can step back or step forward. But the old master of triangulation will have no luck in the middle.