What have an Etonian Tory MP, anarchist academic, and the former Ambassador to the US got in common? Rather a lot, it turns out, when you get them talking about Donald Trump and the failures of modern democracy.

It says something about the state of politics today that even after an hour of Any Questions, its participants were still left with plenty to say in answer to the issues we raised as we chatted after their BBC Radio 4 broadcast.

We began by asking them about the implications of Trump’s election for the UK, and how our government should go about engaging with the new president. Sir Nigel Sheinwald, who served as Ambassador to the US between 2007 and 2012, praised Theresa May’s initial response.

“I think overall it’s a good thing that we’ve got off to a reasonable start with Donald Trump”, he explained. “If we’re going to have a close relationship, let alone a special relationship, it needs a very good relationship at the top.”

Kwasi Kwarteng, a Brexiteer educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, enjoyed success as a historian before being elected as Conservative MP for Spelthorne, Surrey, in 2010. He was in broad agreement that May should look to cooperate with Trump, but warned against unconditional support.

“You can have good friends who are sometimes out of line, and you say to them ‘look, you’re not behaving reasonably’. I think that’s an entirely adult relationship. She can be friendly, and she can sometimes disagree with Donald Trump when he’s stepping out of line.”

Sheinwald also cautioned against embracing Trump too readily, particularly at the expense of the UK’s relationships with other countries. He elaborated: “we need to look out that we don’t look as if we want a cosy relationship with Trump to the exclusion of all our other relationships, particularly remembering that the most important negotiation we’ve got coming up is with the EU.”

Over the course of our interview, it became apparent that Brexit and Trump are so inextricably linked in people’s minds that it is hard to talk of one without the other. Dr Lisa McKenzie, a sociologist based at the LSE who stood for the hard-left party Class War in the 2015 general election, criticised the tendency to view them as isolated incidents.

“Brexit [or] Trump wasn’t about one day. This is something that is 30 years [coming] at least, almost the whole of my lifetime.” McKenzie argued that widening economic inequalities have made the electorate more sympathetic to what she terms “the simple narratives of racism and scapegoating.”

She was also critical of the Left’s failure to come up with an equally compelling case. “Where is the left-wing populism? Where is the other simple narrative? The social democrats won’t put out a simple narrative because it means that they won’t stay in power. But the Left?”

Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, shared some of these views while speaking on the programme itself. Explaining the success of the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump, Thornberry pointed the finger at the politicians who propose “easy answers to difficult questions.”

Kwarteng agreed that there were similarities behind the votes for Trump and Brexit: “people want to control globalisation, they feel the world is changing very fast. They also feel like their leaders […] weren’t doing anything. In the case of Brexit many people felt they weren’t being listened to.”

Listening to and engaging with the Brexiteers and the Trump supporters is what we must do now, Kwarteng claimed. “You’ve got to go beyond the name calling and say why has this happened, why are people disaffected, why don’t people trust their political leaders, why have these votes resulted in the way they have.”

That the views of others have got to be respected was a sentiment shared by others on the panel. Sheinwald commented on how this translates to diplomacy. “By and large your job professionally is to follow the government position, and you can do that in any number of ways.”

“You’ve also got to remember that you’re trying to represent the country as a whole, so I would often, when trying to explain government policy, say: ‘well the government thinks this’ but then I’d try and give people a flavour of the issues and the debate here.”

Jonathan Dimbleby, the presenter of Any Questions? told us that this was also an approach adopted by the BBC. “The BBC has a remit, and it is a very sound remit, to be impartial, and balanced”. However, in coverage of the EU referendum campaigns and the US election, Dimbleby explained that this often becomes problematic.

“The difficulty is do you just say ‘he says that, she says that, here you are, take your choice’, or do you offer interpretation and analysis, and once you do that, in a political environment which is quite highly charged, you are very rapidly open to the assault that you are biased in one way or another”.

Commenting also on the charge that the BBC does not give adequate coverage to enough events across the world, Dimbleby admitted that while it may seem odd for reporting on a particular topic to suddenly be dropped, the pressures that the corporation is under need to be acknowledged.

“The BBC does not have the resources to do, what in my view, a public sector broadcaster needs to have to do its job as well as the most critical could demand.”