A GRIPPING article by the New Yorker’s Susan B Glasser tells us everything we needed to know about Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s secretary of state. And it tells us a lot about US conservatism along the way.

Glasser’s article is online — Google her name and you will find it. It is well worth reading the whole thing.

But I want to pick out three big points. Pompeo is Trump’s secretary of state. This is equivalent to our foreign secretary. In the US, the secretary of state is often seen as the most important government member after the president.

Glasser’s first big point is that Pompeo was once a “never-Trump” Republican: remember all those Republicans who said Trump was terrible? One of the most vocal is now Trump’s right-hand man.

Pompeo said Trump was a “con-artist” about to “take over the Republican Party,” he was a “kook,” a “cancer.” He would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our constitution.”

However, as Glasser notes, Pompeo has not only now joined Trump, he is also completely obsequious to the president. As one official tells Glasser, Pompeo is “like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”

Glasser’s second point is that Pompeo got to be so important in Washington by boasting about his business career — which was actually pretty grim.

Glasser reveals Pompeo moved to Wichita, Kansas, and set up an aeroplane parts company called Thayer Aerospace. One part of the firm, which plated and painted metal aircraft parts, polluted groundwater in Wichita with trichloroethylene (TCE), which is seen as a dangerous carcinogen.

Pompeo got funding for his firm from Koch industries — the company owned by the super-right-wing Koch brothers. Koch Industries then helped his firm to fight the state of Kansas over fixing this pollution.

Ultimately, Thayer Aerospace didn’t do that well, so Pompeo is no business genius. But it did put him in touch with the “Koch-topus” — the huge, billionaire-funded ultra-Republican network that has helped push the US to the right.

Pompeo’s is a very US story, with the future secretary of state meeting multimillionaires through evangelical churches, relying on military industries, working for creepy politically active billionaires and polluting the ground.

As Glasser shows, Pompeo has done well by having very adaptable principles and making friends with the rich and famous.

The third point shown in Pompeo’s history is expecting figures on the right to develop principles — or even stand by the principles they espoused — is not always a reliable hope.

We have similarly seen some “no-Boris” Tories adapt very quickly to being “pro-Boris” Tories: because conservatism is so much about adapting to power and money, when the finance and the power switches, they will often switch too.