Helen Grant MP

As I write (Monday, March 13) MPs and peers are today preparing to cast their historic final votes to trigger Brexit.

For me this is not ‘Goodbye Europe’, it is all about ‘Hello Rest of the World’ and a good (albeit small) example of my own international outreach took a timely step forward this week. I’ll explain. In September I was invited to give a lecture about Brexit in the UK to politics students at Howard University in Washington DC. Whilst there I thought, why not invite one or two of them to come here and see our politics in action for themselves?

Six months later the first (of hopefully many) trans-Atlantic mini-internships became a reality. Ms Mirabella More Weathers and Ms Taylor Rainey arrived today to experience a week in the life of a British MP and our legislature. They have a busy schedule in London, particularly in the Palace of Westminster, and later on in my wonderful constituency of Maidstone and the Weald. It is a coincidence their arrival takes place on such a momentous day in our political history. Quite what they will make of their time here remains to be seen and I will be asking for their candid views for next week’s column – I’m sure it will make interesting reading.

By the time you read this the PM will probably have (or about to) set the formal Article 50 wheels in motion and, whichever way you voted, there is no turning