No one does pomp and ceremony quite like the British, as a 16 foot robot Trump on a golden toilet will testify

There were protests, there was a press conference, and then there was the president, turning the contest to be the next prime minister into a Celebrity Apprentice special

Oh the pomp! The splendour! No one does it like the British, so the British so desperately love to say, and frankly who can doubt them? Where else in the world can a president of the United States wake to find that a 16-foot mechanised statue of himself with his trousers round his ankles has been installed in Trafalgar Square, sitting on a golden toilet, hammering away at his iPhone, barking out a range of offensive slogans at hundreds of decibels?

Only in Britain, that’s where. These are trappings other nations simply do not offer. And, on Trump’s state visit day two, these were not the only trappings either. There were trappings everywhere. Down at the other end of Whitehall, half a mile from Robot Trump on Toilet, was Inflatable Baby Trump.

On Parliament Square its babysitters were gently blowing it up from 9am. There, beneath the iron gaze of Abraham Lincoln, was the latest leader of the free world, being removed from a large holdall, supine and shrivelled, made of polyvinyl chloride, wearing a nappy and emitting a soft long fart noise that lasted almost an hour.

Not that any of it mattered. When Catherine the Great rode to Crimea in 1787, a Russian nobleman called Grigory Potemkin installed fake, portable villages along the route to try and impress her. With this guy, you don’t need to bother. He sees whatever he likes. As he came out of the state dinner at Buckingham Palace on Monday night, he saw, he said, “thousands of well-wishers”.

Nobody else saw them, of course, because they weren’t there. But still, who cares? Though it does rather beg the question as to why such great expense has been gone to for the purpose of impressing a man who is never more impressed than by the events of his own imagination.

In the grand Durbar Court in the centre of the Foreign Office, Donald and Theresa played presidents and prime ministers. Her, not so much a lame duck as one that’s been reversed over just to make absolutely sure, he still living his best life as an anthropomorphised viral tweet that accidentally burnt down the world.

She said she’d never been afraid to stand up to him. He said he was right to tell her that she should have sued the EU. Agree to disagree on that one. As they spoke, Jeremy Corbyn ranted in the streets outside. It was his usual freeform word association game. Peace! Dialogue! Climate! Disarmament! Better world! I transcribed parts of it, but all attempts to render it even remotely coherent suffer an immediate Trigger’s broom effect.

Some of the crowd waved witty banners, like “Obama’s the better golfer”. But mainly, it was the usual Socialist Worker crowd, cheering for the freedom of Palestine, which is always the answer, whatever the question. One young man was seen waving a “You all Work For Rothschild” sign. Corbyn’s people.

Trump was on his best behaviour, but naturally it was whole worlds beneath being good enough. The moment that will linger in the memory is Theresa May patiently explaining to him, in reference to a question from The Times, exactly what the NHS is, only for him to confirm that, yes, the NHS would be “on the table” in any future trade negotiations. That’s the next Labour Party Political Broadcast done then. Because it just wouldn’t be Brexit without some wild talk about the NHS would it?

But the real highlight came later. Three years ago, I distinctly recall Brexiteers getting very upset about Barack Obama having the temerity to come over here and state the trade priorities of his own country. Namely, that if the UK left the EU, it would be at the back of the queue for a trade deal, behind, not unreasonably, the much, larger, and much more important, though sadly UK-less European Union. This, a president of the United States, daring to comment on the Brexit war of lies, by stating his own country’s trade policy, we learned, was “interfering in the referendum”.

And yet, here we are, three years on, there’s another US president in town, and he has turned the contest to become the next British prime minister into a (non) Celebrity Apprentice special. After the press conference, news slowly emerged of Tory hopeful after Tory hopeful, leaping to his demands, and dashing off to the boardroom, in this case the US ambassador’s residence in Regents Park for “bilateral discussions”.

Boris Johnson had a 20 minute phone conversation, Jeremy Hunt would also be having a meeting, we learned, Sajid Javid wouldn’t (why ever could that be?). Nigel Farage was seen going in, Piers Morgan has done his interview. Trump’s people.

And then there was the curious case of Michael Gove. “I don’t know Michael,” Trump declared. Poor Michael. Just days after his election victory, he flew all the way to New York to interview him for The Times in his office in Trump Tower. They even posed for a photograph together, doing the little thumbs up pose, and now here was Trump, without the first clue who he was.

The instant reaction has been to laugh at Trump, yet again. But I’m not so sure. It’s faintly possible he’s always imagined this man who arrived in his office to interview him for a newspaper was, you know, a journalist, not an elected politician who ruled out ever wanting to become prime minister, and now two years later is trying for a second time to do just that. Oh Donald, try and keep up. One day you’ll understand the British, and our little ways, even if none of us have got the first clue what’s going on either.