Team Rudy is understandably beside themselves with delight at the opportunity to put Rudy in a setting overseas, meeting with foreign leaders and recounting his prior visits with Tony Blair and Prince Andrew. The sent around this link of the press avail which is worth listening to all the way through. (Admirers of John O’Sullivan’s fine book “The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister” will hear a plug from Rudy.) They also call our attention to this clip in which Joe Scarborough makes the point that more so than the words, the visuals of a GOP candidate in front of 10 Downing Street “sends a signal to Republican voters this guy is ready for prime time …[and] you gotta admit that’s a heck of a shot.” Well, let’s say it went better than that Thompson meeting with Crist yesterday.

UPDATE: Well, this is an added benefit of his trip as Rudy snags Robert Conquest (author of “The Great Terror” and advisor to Thatcher) and David Pryce-Jones, a familiar name to many conservative readers, as foreign policy advisors. Also joining is Nile Gardiner, former advisor to Margaret Thatcher and now Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation. Pretty much sewed up that conservative Anglophile voting block.