Election nights are party time in Washington. The bars and restaurants fill up and the city rocks. For diplomats, it’s an opportunity – but it’s also a long night, as you trek across the party scene in search of insight and illumination. Invariably, it has its moments. I recall being at the Washington Post party on the night of the presidential election on 8 November 2016. Washington is an overwhelmingly Democrat city and the atmosphere was raucously optimistic, reflecting Hillary Clinton’s small but consistent lead in the polls. As the first results came in a shocked hush fell across the room. People gathered in small, murmuring groups. Within 30 minutes, half the guests had left.

In contrast, I recall speaking to Nancy Pelosi, the queen of the Democrats, at a watch party on 6 November 2018, for the midterms during Trump’s first presidency. I asked her what I should put in my overnight report to London, given that most results wouldn’t be in. She said, with striking confidence, that I should predict that the Democrats would retake the House of Representatives. She was right: the Democrats flipped 41 Republican seats. It gave Pelosi a second term as speaker of the House and gave the world the enjoyable theatre of her sitting directly behind Trump at his State of the Union speeches, rolling her eyes at the bombast.

So what judgments will the current generation of British diplomats have made about the extraordinary political earthquake of Tuesday night, and its implications for British interests and the handling of our most important bilateral relationship for the next two years?

The starting point has to be the scale of this victory. The blue tsunami has swept the Democrats into ownership of the House, the Senate and the majority of governors’ mansions across the country. To a real estate guy such as Donald Trump, imagine how galling it must be to lose so much property in one night: the Monopoly board almost swept clean. The........

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