People in the US aren’t obsessing over the UK’s election result – and that is both a comfort and a curse

The removed vantage point of watching the election was therapeutic at first, explains Holly Baxter, but that feeling was quickly replaced by hollowness

You want to feel like you’re a part of the society you live in, but the society you vote with isn’t there (Bloomberg/Getty)

When you watch an election unfold in your home country from thousands of miles away, you feel pretty useless. Though I did vote last Friday (via proxy vote), I felt very removed from the political mood of the UK and was genuinely stunned by the results. Sitting on my sofa in Brooklyn with a large glass of red wine, I watched Jo Swinson lose her seat and then Jeremy Corbyn announce that he would not take Labour into the next election. I texted my dad, who lives in Newcastle, about his door-to-door conversations with voters and his predictions, and I got a sense of how people in my hometown were feeling.

I have lots of friends in London who also kept in contact through the evening – but it wasn’t the same as watching the election results come in on a big screen in a pub in Hackney or in the London newsroom, while discussing predictions with friends and colleagues. When I woke up the morning after, the Americans I lived alongside didn’t even remember there had been a seismic political event across the Atlantic at all. There were no fluttering “Vote Labour” or “Get Brexit Done” stickers left behind as testament to a moment in history. What felt like a gut-punch to me was nothing at all to 99 per cent of the people I lived around.

In a way, that’s therapeutic. You get to escape the immediate consequences of a left-wing nightmare. You don’t have to watch the celebrations of people you didn’t vote for, and you don’t get bombarded with crowing right-wingers on TV (well, you do, but they’re Trump-supporting Republicans, and their concerns are a little different).