Nigel Farage isn’t the man for the job, but that doesn’t mean the current ambassador is.

Sir Kim Darroch. It all sounds a bit 18th Century, doesn’t it? Hardly anyone has a name like that anymore.

But enough with the reverse snobbery.

The British Ambassador to the United States’ background, as a boarding school pupil in Abingdon, doesn’t disqualify him from the job. If anything the Americans find the British elite cute, and it is an absolute pleasure for them to talk to someone who would make them think nothing has changed since the 1950s. And, oh my, don’t they just love the accent.

However the world has changed, and the toffs have reinvented themselves. They aren’t coming back from India with the finest jewels and spices or ‘civilising’ the Mau Maus in Kenya. They are now, in the vast majority, arch Blairite/Cameronite Remainers. One day, they will move on and adapt to the post-Brexit world as they did to the post-empire world but we don’t really have time to wait for that to happen.

Darroch is a man who has spent his whole career acquiring the skills that would suit, what seemed, the inevitabilities of a Britain in the EU and a United States governed by Hillary Clinton. But with Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election following up the Brexit vote, those skills don’t really count for much.

Between 2007 and 2012 he was Her Majesty’s Permanent Representative to a European Union Trump would happily see disappear and from 2012 to 2015 he was National Security Advisor to David Cameron, endorsing national security policies that Trump finds nonsensical.

But at least he had us believe that he had acted quickly to build a strong relationship with the president-elect.

In a memo, he re-assured Theresa May, saying: “It bears repeating that this soon to be president-elect is above all an outsider and an unknown quantity, whose campaign pronouncements may reveal his instincts, but will surely evolve and, particularly, be open to outside influence if pitched right. And having, we believe, built better relationships with his team than have the rest of Washington diplomatic corps, we should be well placed to do this.”

A job well done, as long as the president-elect doesn’t then go and call for you to be replaced.

We know Donald Trump isn’t too bothered about diplomatic protocol, so this isn’t as shocking as if a career politician had said it. But he’s still the president-elect so his views still matter.

As for the man Trump suggested should replace Darroch, I’ll put it this way. If I find myself in trouble across the Atlantic, I’m not sure I’d want to rely on Nigel Farage and his team to bail me out.

Just because Farage isn’t qualified for the job, however, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be on the lookout for somebody slightly more in tune with Trump’s world than Darroch. These sorts of British diplomats are pretty thin on the ground, having got used to a certain way of life, but they do exist.

Although we shouldn’t be too quick to dispense with Darroch. We are still a sovereign country and the government has done the right thing in reminding Donald Trump of that by sticking up for the current ambassador.

But let’s not pretend he is someone who will have Trump’s ear or be able to build a new Special Relationship at the time we need it most. If he is quietly shifted elsewhere in a year or so then it would be a very smart move.