Here's what we can expect if Nikki Haley becomes president

President Haley wouldn’t tweet, wouldn’t call for political opponents to be jailed, and wouldn’t get too pally with the Russians. But the average American might not notice much change from the Trump administration

George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump… Nikki Haley? President Nikki Haley. Try that on for size. How does it feel? Could this forthright, articulate, talented politician be the one to break the glass ceiling? To succeed where Geraldine Ferraro, Elizabeth Dole, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton failed? The first American president of Indian descent? What will they call Michael Haley? First gent?

She dismisses claims she wants to run for the White House in 2020 for the Republicans – surely a suicidal notion among a party the Trumpites have captured – but, later, who knows? She already has a typically trite campaign slogan ready – “Can’t is not an option”, the title of her autobiography (another clue to her ambition), and apparently a slogan bandied around by her Indian Sikh parents as they encouraged their children to better and better things.

Haley, as the world knows from watching her tough no-nonsense berating of the Russians and Iranians at the UN, is certainly plausible, and her high-profile stint as US ambassador to the United Nations gave her valuable foreign policy experience to add to her long political career in South Carolina, where she served in the legislature and two terms as state governor. There is talk of her going to the Senate, if Lindsey Graham moves across to, say, the attorney general’s office in a Trump shakedown in the autumn. That too would garnish her impressive CV. Plenty of presidents were once senators (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama) and many were ex-governors (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W Bush) but not many were both.

But what kind of president would President Haley be? The answer is predictable: a classic Southern conservative Republican, with distinct “Tea Party” tendencies. Her views on women’s rights, for example, would have to be more enlightened than Donald Trump’s – how could they not be? But she is “pro-life” and the only time she seems to have spent much time condemning sexism is when she writes in her book about having to rebut allegations about infidelity thrown at her by journalists. You get the impression that she might well have animated Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.

President Haley wouldn’t tweet, wouldn’t call for political opponents to be jailed, and wouldn’t get too pally with the Russians. But the average American might not notice much change from the Trump administration.

What about race, and migration? There is a story and quite a shocking one given that she was born in 1972, that her parents wanted to enter the five-year-old Nimrata, or “Nikki”, Randhawa into a beauty contest in their little South Carolinian town of Bamberg. But because there always two Miss Bambergs, a white one and a black one, and she didn’t fit into either category, she was disqualified. That must have affected her.

She also spoke out against Trump’s mad plan to ban Muslims from travelling to America – “absolutely un-American”. It is said that she was a quiet advocate of dumping the old Confederate flag from the grounds of the state house in Columbia, South Carolina. Again, she has no whiff of the kind of racism that surrounds some senior Republicans and Trump backers, and is rumoured to be more compassionate towards refugees; but she has flipped her own recent heritage as the daughter of immigrants as the very reason why she supports a hard-line approach to migration to the US.

When she delivered the official Republican response to President Obama’s state of the union speech in 2012 it was the usual Republican small-state, low-tax stuff. Conservative, but not Trumpian. In economics and trade, then, you might hope she’d prove more collaborative and considered than Trump – but if she needs the votes of “deplorables” to win the nomination and then the White House, anything could happen. Like Mike Pence, who with Senator Graham and even Ivanka Trump must be her closest rival for a bid for the big job in 2024, she would pull the Republican party back to a more traditional form of conservatism which may prove hazardous indeed.

On foreign policy she was reputedly one of the few “adults in the room”, restraining Trump from some of his more destructive impulses, trying to be kinder to old allies, but also more confrontational towards Russia than her boss. She was up for the move of the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and perfectly happy to deliver fire-and-fury rhetoric towards Iran, Venezuela and North Korea, as and when required. She was also prepared to attack the very institution, the UN, that was hosting her for its record on human rights. Balancing her boss’s pugnacious America First policies and rhetoric while maintaining dignity on the world stage is probably her most important work internationally. Contrast the respectful silences she is heard in with the chuckles that welcomed Trump’s bombast the last time he addressed the General Assembly.

It is curious that, in America and Britain, and for all the leftist assumptions about the confluence of feminism and progressive values, it is the right who have tended to promote women for the highest office. Governor Palin, though disastrous, was a nominee for the vice-presidency in 2008, and many compare Haley to Margaret Thatcher (both technically the daughters of shopkeepers, Haley’s mother ran a clothing shop, while her father taught at the university). Maybe Haley will settle for the vice-presidency in 2020, as a springboard for 2024, or in 2024 itself. One thing you may be sure of is that Haley will not make her gender an issue in the election of 2024, even if everyone else tries to. Other issues matter more to her, to America and to the rest of the world. She’s a woman, but that doesn’t make her anyone’s liberal.