The “new sheriff in town” swaggered into the Munich Security Conference a year ago and launched a shock and awe attack on his transatlantic allies that did so much damage that both Europe and the US are still reeling.

On his first official visit, Donald Trump’s new vice president JD Vance declared that “in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat”. European governments, he claimed contemptuously, were “running in fear of their own voters” using “ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation” to suppress dissent while “opening the floodgates” to mass migration.

Vance’s antipathy was even blunter in the Signal chat accidentally sent to The Atlantic magazine’s editor. “I just hate bailing out Europe again,” he complained.

Offence was taken and Vance and the entire US executive branch still enjoy unprecedented levels of unpopularity in polls across most of Europe. Vance’s summer holiday in the Cotswolds, during which he and the UK’s then foreign secretary David Lammy broke fishing licensing regulations, did nothing to restore his image abroad.

Vance and his wife Usha were heartily booed by many in the crowd at the........

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