Is the exit of Steve Bannon from the White House staff a sign, as some have suggested, that we are reaching end game for the Trump presidency? Or is that just wishful thinking?

I was hardly alone in believing Trump couldn’t last seven weeks in the job, let alone seven months. Yet here he still is, while his aides keep falling like discarded, broken playthings.

When Bannon himself said it was the end of the presidency, it turned out he only meant that the more aggressive decision-making might now be toned down.

While Trump waved Bannon bye-bye (via Twitter, of course), with this thumbs-up for his right-wing propaganda website Breitbart News: “Fake News needs the competition!” As if Trump was capable of distinguishing fake from real.

With so much misunderstanding and misinformation trotting out on the information super-highway, it can be hard even for a grown-up to tell the thoroughbred from the pantomime donkey.

Is this life itself the real thing, or are we just a simulation created in some greater being’s experiment or game? Who can say for sure?

We’ve grown used to remarkably convincing CGI mammoths and dinosaurs wandering into our wildlife documentaries. And now with Sky Sports, “home of the Premier League”, also broadcasting an “Interactive World Cup” – football simulations played on PlayStation and Xbox – the line between real and pretend is getting very sketchy indeed.

Not that news, or reality, have ever been precisely what they seemed.

On the southern fringe of the French Alps lies the beautiful lake of Serre-Ponçon. It’s a favourite with windsurfers, kayakers, wild swimmers, sailors of small boats. But is it really a lake? It wasn’t there until the late 1950s, when a mighty 123-metre high dam was thrown across the Durance river.

As well as water sports, it powers 16 hydroelectric plants and provides irrigation to a huge area of land. Several villages were drowned in its creation, including one whose cemetery still stands at the water’s edge while the buildings lie beneath the ripples.

There’s a great photo of the village priest of Savines, seen from behind, watching his old church being dynamited in about 1959. It’s a brilliant composition and a brilliant piece of timing by a local newspaper photographer.

But is that really the priest, as his dress and his pose suggest? Who knows? It’s a great piece of story-telling about a real event anyway.

As is another shot from the same paper – surely staged – of an old woman washing clothes at the traditional outdoor village laundry while a massive concrete bridge towers high above her, still under construction.

As it happens, I know that bridge. I’ve crossed it several times. The roadway is just a few metres above the surface of the lake. You’d never guess how deep its legs reach under the water.

The flooding of those villages sounds like a classic modern tragedy. But then there’s this.

The dam and the lake were first proposed in 1856 – not for sport or power, but to save the villagers, and others further downstream, from any repeat of the devastating floods of that year and 13 years earlier. Nothing in this story is not exactly as it first seems.

Now there’s the worldwide web – a wonderful, unprecedented storehouse of information, but one in which it can be all but impossible to sort the good from the dodgy. The matter-of-fact from the well-meant wrong-end-of-the-stick. Or worse.

A photo made it onto the front page of a respected US newspaper last week showing a protester savagely beating a fallen police officer. Or that’s what the caption claimed it showed. It went viral online.

In fact the picture was several years old. It had been cropped to remove the evidence that it was actually taken in Greece, not Virginia. The anti-fascist logo on the attacker’s jacket had been added digitally. Faked news.

I wish I could unsee the picture of a dog, apparently skinned alive, which cropped up in my social media feed last week. Very grisly, very upsetting. But was it quite what it seemed? There were small clues that it might not have been been – surely there should have been more blood if the poor animal had really been alive. Or is that just wishful thinking again?

The purpose of those who posted it was to gather shocked “signatures” for an online petition. A worthy cause, no doubt, but does it do any good in the real world to heap up names in this way?

Great claims are sometimes made for such petitions as democracy in action. But I suspect they have become merely a modern form of prayer. An appeal to a distant higher authority. An expression of wishes. Something to make you feel better by giving you the illusion of doing something when there’s nothing you can do.

Now let us pray – and sign petitions – for the US to change its gun laws, to scrap its nuclear arsenal, and to stop waging war.

We all know by now that many times more Americans are shot dead by small children than are killed or wounded in terrorist attacks. That simple fact, at least, is not fake news.

Putting guns in the hands of infants is a very poor idea. And right now we have two tired toddlers – Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un – stropping around the world playground with very big guns indeed. It’s high time their toys were taken away.                                                                                                             

What do you think of the show so far? As bad as you expected – or worse?

Perhaps the best we can say is that if you’re reading this, then presumably he hasn’t yet pressed the start button on nuclear armageddon.

Every time I turn on the news it seems to be running another mad episode of the same hysterical satire. At least it would be hysterical if it weren’t so far-fetched.

It’s hard to believe this stuff is really happening. Almost as hard as it is to believe a word uttered by the host of the biggest, craziest gameshow on Earth.

He says torture can work. But nothing seems capable of getting the truth out of him.

OK, he’s a delusional narcissist. Perhaps he actually believes what he says – about the turn-out at his inauguration, for example, or all those supposed fraudulent votes in the presidential election.

That excuse won’t wash for all the bootlickers surrounding him. They know his “alternative facts” are lies. Yet they pass them on like tablets from Above.

It’s a close call, perhaps, but to me the scariest thing about the new administration in Washington is the brazen way it goes about suppressing the truth.

About, for example, climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency is not allowed to say anything. Anything at all.

NASA, whose photos and scientific data tell a scary story the chief bully doesn’t want to hear, is gagged.

Reporters are arrested for reporting the facts about legitimate protests. Legitimate, that is, until all protest is criminalised.

This truth-crushing is one of the first tell-tale signs of fascism.

Yes, I used the F-word. Think I’m exaggerating? Think it’s not really as bad as that? The diaries of those who suffered in the 1930s reveal that they constantly believed things had gone as far as they could. And then they went further. The next step is always unbelievable.

It’s the sense of disbelief that keeps people going from day to day. A sense of disbelief like the one we’re experiencing right now.

No, I don’t know how it’ll all end up. No one does. Perhaps history will repeat the old tragedies as farce this time.

There’s certainly a farcical feel to a lot of it. Laughter is a natural reaction to such disbelief. As it is to the bizarre spectacle of a monstrous ego floundering so far out of its intellectual depth.

But there’s this. The last time the world faced fascism it took a six-year war, 60million deaths and an international effort to stop it. Who now is going to stop the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen?

There’s not a lot you or I can do. The opposition has to come from within the US itself. In fact, it really needs to come from within the Republican Party in Congress.

So who among them is going to be brave enough to say: “OK, Donny, you’ve had your fun, now it’s time for beddy-byes”?
 
 
 

Careful with that stake...
 
 
Money isn’t my specialism. The words “finance”, “economics” or “business” usually get me flipping channels or turning the page. I do occasionally catch moments of money talk on Radio 5, and it nearly always sounds as if they’re speaking a foreign language. But I’ve noticed one word cropping up a lot lately. Stakeholders.

The same word keeps appearing on a website I work for. It was in a planning report I read the other day (I have such interesting reading). And I’ve even heard it slipping into conversation with teachers about education.

But what does it mean? Who are these stakeholders, and why have so many of them started appearing lately?

It gives me visions of a kind of inverted zombie apocalypse. A world full of people armed with stakes, ready to plunge them in should any members of the living dead come stomping round the corner.

Are you a stakeholder? Do stakeholders litter your conversation? Or are you (can I say this?) normal?

Of course, it’s jargon. Which is closely related to “zhargon”, the Yiddish word for Yiddish, or “language that other people can’t understand”. Which may be very useful if you’re a persecuted minority.

But jargon has a sneaky way of slipping into wider use – perhaps because people think it makes them sound smart, or expert in some way. And, hopefully, anything but persecuted.

I’m sure those stakeholders will eventually slip away back into the dust they came from, to be replaced by some other badly contrived metaphor. But for now they seem to be the buzzword du jour.

“Buzzword” itself, of course, being a buzzword that’s now slightly stale, a tad old hat, retro-styled, past its sell-by date. Like blue sky thinking outside the box – an odd notion that probably wouldn’t help any junior stakeholder up the rungs of the management ladder today, as it undoubtedly did around the turn of the millennium.

Your old hat is sky blue? Oh, be off with you. And careful how you hold your stake while climbing that ladder.

I hope Theresa May squirmed when she saw her picture on the weekend front pages. I did - and so, I'm sure, did much of the world.

To listen to BBC news day after day last week, you'd have thought it was something to be proud of that the prime minister was the first foreign leader to visit the new US president. It wasn't. It was deeply shameful.

In allowing herself to be photographed hand-in-hand, smiling like a happy couple, May allowed herself - and by extension, us - to be associated with the most feared and despised regime in the world right now.

If you, or she, think a trade deal with the States is worth it - or any real alternative to being in the European market - consider this. British exports to the EU are around 15 times those to the US.

And the new president is a wheeler-dealer property tycoon. He will see May as someone who has quit one home without another to go to. In other words, a sucker to be taken advantage of.

Which could be extremely bad new for the NHS, ripe for exploitation by US companies. 

US food safety and welfare standards don't come up to ours either. Or to put it another way, ours don't come down to theirs. Yet.

Meanwhile May prepares to chuck foreign academics out of Britain, ensuring the UK - like the US - loses some of its best brains. A form of madness that recalls both Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

All in all, it's a very strange time for Jeremy Corbyn to give the government a free pass on leaving the EU, rendering the debate on Article 50 all but pointless. A description which now sadly applies also to the Labour leadership. 

That George Soros is an interesting bloke. A former railway porter, waiter and travelling salesman, he is now one of the 30 richest people in the world.

Like many obscenely wealthy people, he likes to style himself – and no doubt think of himself – as a philanthropist. But you can’t rise from rags to riches without stepping on a few toes, and probably a few fingers too.

Soros is still known as “the man who broke the Bank of England” after making a billion out of the UK’s Black Wednesday crisis of 1992.

All in all, then, not the kind of fellow you might expect me to quote with approval.

But whatever the moral rights and wrongs of his business dealings, someone with his track record must know a thing or two about international trade. And some of the things he said at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland bear thinking about.

It may be that he is not entirely impartial on the subject of Donald Trump. It was reported that Trump’s election victory cost Soros $1bn in lost investments. So perhaps it’s no surprise that he calls the new US President “an imposter and con man” and speaks of him “awakening dark forces”.

But he’s put a small slice at least of his money where his mouth is. In the fortnight after the election, he put $10million into a fund to combat the rise in hate crime.

And he said in Davos: “I personally am convinced that Trump is going to fail. Not because of people like me who would like him to fail, but because the ideas that guide him are inherently self-contradictory.”

If Soros is right, this is not necessarily good news. Because the way he expects Trump to fail is by starting a global trade war in which everyone will be losers.

He isn’t always right, of course. As he told the Wall Street Journal in 2008: “I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong.”

But he’s been spectacularly right in the past about Britain. So it may be worth noting what he says about us now:
“In my opinion it is unlikely that Prime Minister May is actually going to remain in power. Already she has a very divided cabinet, a very small majority in Parliament. And I think she will not last.”

And of Brexit?

“At the moment the people in the UK are in denial. The current economic situation is not as bad as was predicted and they live in hope.”

Those hopes, says Soros, will sour before the divorce from Europe is complete – which will “take a very long time”. 

And the closer we get to the decree absolute, the worse shape the UK economy will be in, and the poorer we will all be. To the point where before we’ve actually left, we’ll be begging Europe to take us back.

He even suggests that three days after finally quitting the EU, we could be back in.

“It’s much harder to divorce than to get married… You could have a situation in 2019 or 2020 when Britain will leave the EU – because it does have to take place – but they could leave on a Friday but join over the weekend and have the new arrangement in place on Monday morning.”

Believe it or not (and I’m not sure I do), it’s an interesting scenario.
 
 
----
 
 
Strange how TV seems to be invading real life, and vice-versa. Reality blurring hopelessly with fantasy.

Thirty-six years after America put a second-rate B-movie actor in the White House, it’s gone the whole surreal hog by installing a third-rate gameshow host there.

I’m still hoping I wake up and find the past year has been nothing but a dream foisted on us all by one dysfunctional character, like the ninth season of Dallas. It’d all be so much more entertaining if you knew there would be no dire consequences for the real world.

Meanwhile, back in the disunited kingdom, one of my friends announced last week that she was going to be on The Undateables. I don’t know how she, or Channel 4, think she qualifies, but I guess that’s up to them.

The next day another friend alerted me that his old house was featuring on Location, Location, Location. 

Do such things come in threes? Perhaps this should be my moment to apply for a spot on Mastermind or Only Connect. Or would that be Pointless?

Remember Michael Gove? If you’re a teacher you will, and not with much affection. Otherwise...

Of all the political casualties of 2016, only his erstwhile boss David Cameron fell further faster than Gove. Yet there was a moment when it seemed Gove might become Cameron’s successor. And the former (awful) education secretary and (unexpectedly decent) justice secretary will be remembered for the quote which summed up the last extraordinary year better than any other.

“I think,” he said, “people in this country have had enough of experts.”

So that’s it, then. As a nation we no longer listen to people who seem to know what they’re talking about. 

Never mind facts, reason, science, sensible argument and evidence-based conclusions. Let’s take our lead from whoever shouts their uninformed opinion the loudest.

It’s the zeitgeist. And not just in this country, either. How else can you possibly make sense of the man who in nine days’ time will be sworn in as president of what is still, for now, the most powerful country in the world?

You may have seen the New Yorker cartoon in which an airline passenger stands up and says: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” And in nearly every seat a hand is raised. 

On one level it’s a brilliant piece of satire. Though Donald Trump is neither depicted nor mentioned, you know it’s about him. Just as you’d have known, if it had appeared in a British paper, that it was about Brexit. But it’s too close to the mark to be very funny.

I don’t know whether Vladimir Putin really took to underhand methods to influence the outcome of the US election. But I’m sure he’s enjoying the chaos that has ensued. 

I don’t have a great deal of faith in the intelligence of the CIA, whichever meaning you give to that word. But I don’t put much faith, either, in Trump’s assertive denial that Russian involvement had nothing to do with his victory. He would say that, wouldn’t he?

Whatever else it’s done, the most surreal election result in American history has had one desirable effect.
Never again – surely – can Uncle Sam even pretend to lecture the rest of the world about democracy. 

I thought that after the “hanging chads” scandal of George W Bush’s win in 2001. This time there can be no moral, political or intellectual high ground left for America to claim.

And not just because of the bankruptcy of a system that hands victory to a candidate who got three million fewer votes than his opponent. With or without Russian help – and certainly with the huge assistance of FBI director James Comey, whose smearing of Hillary Clinton was timed for maximum effect. (Given the recent CIA claims, one has to wonder how much the whole mess of US politics today owes to the age-old rivalry between the bureau and the agency.)

Weirdly, given all we know about him, Trump talks a lot about morals and ethics. About “draining the swamp”. He was even given credit last week for getting the Republican Congress to backtrack on a plan to scrap the Office of Congressional Ethics, the office meant to keep an eye on them, to keep them at least vaguely honest.
One of my friends described his intervention as “some good news at last”. I’m not so sure it was as good as all that.

Yes, in this instance, a bad step was avoided. But it also revealed the power Trump can wield with one tweet over the one organisation that in theory ought to be able to keep him in check.

With Trump on the flight deck, we’re in for a bumpy ride indeed. Whether or not his attention is all on his smartphone. While he’s tapping in his 140 characters about The Apprentice or Saturday Night Live, the real danger will come from the gimcrack crew he’s appointed to actually fly the plane.

A bunch of blokes (all but two are blokes) whose chief qualification for anything is having loads of money. Who have a lot of experience of boardroom business but precious little in the departments they will now have to run.
And whose lack of real-world expertise is most dangerously encapsulated in the number of climate-change deniers and religious fundamentalists in their midst.

Whichever way you look at it, they are a frightening bunch of people.

Only one has run a federal agency before – Elaine Chao, labour secretary under GW Bush and now to be transport secretary under Trump. She is reckoned to be worth $24million (not counting the $22.8m fortune of her husband Mitch McConnell, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate), which makes her the seventh richest member of the team.

The third richest is former ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson, whose chief qualification for the role of Secretary of State is the Order of Friendship he got in 2013 from... Vladimir Putin.

Experts, eh? Who needs ’em?

So goodbye 2016, and good riddance. Let’s pray 2017 turns out rather better – but don’t bet your house on it.

A year ago I wrote here: “Amid all the apocalyptic gloom, there is a chance – just a chance – that 2015 will be remembered as the year things started to get better. The year the world looked over the edge into the abyss … and stepped back.”

Oh dear. I could hardly know then that the popular response to reaching the cliff’s edge would not be a mere step forward, but an enthusiastic leap.

I wasn’t predicting Brexit, or a Trump presidency, but then, who was? I did, in fact, describe Trump exactly 12 months ago as “frontrunner” – because that’s what the polls said at the time – but I never imagined that would last.

History is full of events, characters and direction changes that appear inevitable in hindsight but were unpredicted, unpredictable, beforehand. I fear 2016 was one such landmark year.

Not that I entirely believe all the talk – dangerous talk – about the rise of “populism”.

Why should racism, sexism, nationalism, war-mongering violence be any more popular, or “populist”, than more valuable values? 

I’m pretty sure they’re not. The danger is that the nasty parties, having achieved slender, even debatable, victories, have taken not only power but dominance of the public debate. To criticise, even to question, their position as victors is to be shouted down, belittled, threatened.

They claim to be “the people”, as if everyone else weren’t people. But to describe the self-styled “alt-right” (a.k.a. fascists) as populist is an insult to the populace.

It’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton, for all her considerable faults, actually got 2.9million more votes than Donald Trump. 

And that however much the government – and, shamefully, the supposed opposition – may talk of “a clear mandate” or “the will of the people”, only about a quarter of the British people actually voted to leave the European Union.

It wasn’t the people that got us into these fine messes. It was a combination of misguided leadership, misled electorates, and serious flaws of democratic process.

We are where we are. But exactly where that may be remains unclear.

Even one of the greatest of American thinkers, Noam Chomsky, appears to have had crystal ball failure. His thoughts are generally too sophisticated and complex to summarise easily, but I’ll try.

Before the US election, he said a vote for Trump would be “a vote for the end of the world” – or at least for the end of life as we know it. Irreparable damage to the biosphere, that frighteningly thin layer of soil, water and air that supports all life.

A few days after the election, Chomsky found a brighter side to look on. He suggested then that four years of Trump might prove so devastating for America in the short term that longer-term prospects for a different kind of leadership would inevitably be improved.

It may be a slender hope. It may also be the only one we have right now. But we know how inevitability has a habit of shifting its ground. And how unreliable New Year predictions are.
 
 


A 'healthy' demand for warplanes and bombs
 
 
Round about the time Boris Johnson was putting his foot in it by telling the truth about Saudi Arabia and its “proxy wars”, a business conference was taking place in Palm Beach, Florida.

In it, investors were assured that things were looking up. That the Saudis’ various adventures – and the Syrian war which has brought such horrors to Aleppo and elsewhere – were yielding what one company vice president called “indirect benefits”.

Bruce Tanner of Lockheed Martin told the Credit Suisse conference that events in Syria provided “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theatre”.

This is not a play. What he calls a theatre, the rest of us call a war zone. Which is precisely where his firm makes its profits.

Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor jet was much in evidence this past summer in the skies over East Anglia, despite its “stealth” label. Demand for it and the new F-35 is very healthy in the Middle East just now. Healthy in a business sense, that is, not in a health sense.

At the same conference, head honchos for other military manufacturers were upbeat too. Raytheon’s CEO Tom Kennedy reported “a significant uptick” for “defence solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East”. 

“It’s all the turmoil they have going on,” he explained, “whether the turmoil’s occurring in Yemen, whether it’s with the Houthis, whether it’s occurring in Syria or Iraq, with Isis.”

It’s an ill wind, and all that. And it’s not just the Yanks making a killing.

We may not share the Americans’ insane attitude to guns in our own homes and streets. But we still get a significant slice of our national income from making and flogging weapons for use elsewhere.

Britain is now officially the world’s second largest arms exporter. Which is why Boris got so roundly ticked off for upsetting the Saudis, now the world’s largest arms importer.

Doesn't it just make you proud to be British, and glad that we're "taking back control"?

I came in for some flak elsewhere last week for appending Donald Trump’s name to a list that included Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Mugabe and Putin. This was unfair of me, apparently, because Trump has not ordered, or otherwise been responsible for, mass murder. A cynic, or perhaps a realist, might add the word “yet” to that statement.

The point I was making was that all those gentlemen were inflicted on the world by democracy. That system Winston Churchill described wittily – and maybe generously – as the worst way of choosing a government “except all the others”. 

But the fear of Trump is a rational one. Evidence-based, unlike almost everything Trump says, at least publicly.

Hitler, Mussolini et al were not yet mass murderers when they first came to power. The worst they had yet said or done at that point was not notably worse (or very different) than Trump’s idea of a wall between the USA and Mexico. Or his threat to deport three million “illegal immigrants”.

The foul tide of racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-intellectual abuse that his election has opened the floodgates to is, sadly, no invention. At least two friends of friends of mine have received death threats based on their race, sexuality and job titles. 

The unleashing, the entitlement, of the bullies has real overtones of Hitler’s brownshirts. In fact it’s all horribly reminiscent of revolutions and coups everywhere.

I am reminded of a quotation from the 1970s BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius: “Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.”

And of the philopher John Stuart Mill’s observation: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

The question that begs is: What should we do?

We can perhaps pray for legal moves and re-counts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But even if the election result were to be overturned – and that’s surely a  long shot – there’s no easy way of burying all those poisons back in the mud.

There are many ways in which this looks like a Doomsday scenario. And no shortage of intelligent, well-informed people ready to tell you so.

Perhaps, though, in focusing on the danger Trump represents, his opponents risk making it more real. Just as by joining the Trump-crazed media in concentrating on his outrageousness, Hillary Clinton’s campaign succeeded only in making him fatally attractive to a lot of voters. In making the abnormal normal.

There is an alternative, slightly more reassuring, view of Trump. It’s the one put forward by David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University.

Writing in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, he says: “In a country that has seen more bad presidents than good ones, Trump isn’t such an outlier. Not even if he is the nastiest of them all.”

Runciman describes the president-elect, aptly enough, as “the naughtiest kid in the class”. And says that in voting for him the US public was throwing a tantrum, “safe in the knowledge that the grown-ups will be there to pick up the pieces”.

Reassuring only if you trust the grown-ups and are confident they’re up to the job.

It's something of a tradition in British politics to bury bad news on days when public attention is elsewhere. So it was that while the horrified eyes of the world were all turned Stateside, the government quietly slipped its Investigatory Powers Act through Parliament. 

A bill the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, who knows about these things, calls  "the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy".

In the words of Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group: “The UK now has a surveillance law that is more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy. The state has unprecedented powers to monitor and analyse UK citizens’ communications regardless of whether we are suspected of any criminal activity.”

There seems to be a prevailing attitude here that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from surveillance. But this rather depends on what the definition of "wrong" is - and who exactly is defining it.

How much wrong have the vast majority of America's Muslims done? How much wrong had Germany's Jewish population done in the 1930s? Or the Communists? Or the homosexuals? Or the Gypsies?  Or the disabled? Or the mentally ill? How much wrong were those who spoke out in the defence of those groups doing?

The surveillance powers now to be handed to the police and intelligence agencies have been a favourite policy of Theresa May's since she was Home Secretary. But they can't be written off as just a typical Tory policy because the basic plan was drawn up under Tony Blair's supposedly Labour government.

Which may be one reason opposition to the Bill was half-hearted at best. Another, perhaps, is that people have assumed for a long time that spying on the public was routine anyway. 

Have you ever felt that Big Brother wasn't watching you? The suspicion is that the new law merely makes legal the sort of thing that's been going on in secret for decades.

And, of course, if you're in the habit of putting everything there is to know about you on social media you really have nothing and nowhere to hide.

You may even feel this doesn't matter too much. That you trust the British government to do the right thing with whatever information it can get its hands on.

But Lib-Dem Lord Strasburger, one of the few Parliamentary voices raised in protest, makes a good point about that. A rather chilling point.

“We do have to worry about a UK Donald Trump," he says. "If we do end up with one - and that is not impossible - we have created the tools for repression."

And he adds: “The real Donald Trump has access to all the data that the British spooks are gathering and we should be worried about that.”

Indeed we should.


----


My neighbour stopped me in the street the other day and asked: "What do you think about that Donald Trump, then?" Don't think he reads this blog, my neighbour.

"Oh, please," I said. "I'd rather not think about him at all."

But here we go again. More thoughts about America's president-elect. And if you're sick of the subject, believe me, you cannot wish any more than I do that it would just go away. Sadly -  tragically - it's unlikely to be going away any time soon.

I won't waste your time or my emotion reciting again here all the reasons why Trump's election is a major catastrophe. If you've been paying attention at all lately, you know that already.

But Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of humanity's descent into hell in a handcart. And if we really are heading for some very dark times indeed - as I fear we are - it shouldn't seem so hard to believe.

The recent decades of relative affluence and comfort here in what's called the West are the anomaly. Our generation, and the one above, are arguably the most fortunate people the world has seen - or we have been up to now.

History is full of periods and places when life has been nasty and brutish by the standards you and I think of as normal. The new normal, like the old normal - and the normal now in many parts of the world - is not as pleasant as our normal.

People may tell you we owe our relative comfort to democracy. But democracy brought us Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Mugabe, Putin... and Trump. 

"I'm more worried about Brexit," my neighbour told me.  "Brexit's the destruction of my country forever - Trump is only for four years."

But an awful lot of damage can be done in four years (see the list of names above). 

As I explained last week, I don't expect Trump personally to preside even that long. But there's no guarantee at all that the sea change he represents isn't the start of something much longer-lasting. Something capable of seriously harming the whole world, not just the USA.

So what will President Pence be like? That’s the question we should be asking now. The one American voters should have asked themselves before last Tuesday.

It’s not that I expect President Trump to be assassinated in office - or while he’s still merely President-elect. Though in the land of the gun that clearly can’t be ruled out.

And while it’s entirely possible that his health may fail - at 70 he will be the oldest person ever to become US President – that can’t be assumed. Though Trump’s unnatural colouring, and his general demeanour, suggest to me someone who’s a prime candidate for a heart attack.

The FBI, who did so much to put him in office by smearing his opponent, can’t be expected to do anything to remove him. Probably.

The Republican Party, which he supposedly represents, is another matter. 

Plenty of senior Republicans find Trump as repellent as most of the world does - though not necessarily for the same reasons. Those who distanced themselves from him when they thought he couldn’t win the presidency may now be racing to kiss his hand, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t plotting behind his back.

House Speaker Paul Ryan refused to share a campaign platform with Trump. He now credits the tycoon with “the most incredible political feat that I have seen in my lifetime”. Which is probably about right. 

Ryan’s probably right, too, when he credits the Trump effect with enabling the Republicans to retain control of both chambers of Congress. He talks now of “working together”.

But Trump is anything but a conventional Republican. In fact, it’s hard to say he’s a conventional anything. Since he seems to change his mind every time he opens his mouth, it’s hard to know what he stands for. If anything. Especially as his relationship with the truth is somewhat rocky.

With the Democrats now out of power in Senate, House of Representatives and White House, you might think the Republicans can go ahead and do whatever they want. But what Trump wants may not be what the party wants. Indeed, if it is, he will very rapidly disappoint the masses who swept him to power. The last thing they want is more of the same domination by the big-business interests that have always pulled the Republican strings. 

That leaves the Republicans in Congress as the only possible true opposition to the man they put in the Oval Office. Fur will fly – some of it of an improbably orange hue. Republicans who fear the man at the top could yet destroy the party he has twice quit – in 1999 and 2011 – may have an incentive to topple him.

But the real reason I predict Trump’s presidency will be short-lived is the man himself. 

He has said in the past that he’s like a kid who loses interest in the toy he always wanted once he’s unwrapped it on Christmas Day. 

Running for the presidency as the most unlikely candidate ever was a great game. One he probably never really expected to win. But will he really want the responsibility of actually doing the job? Maybe at first, but I suspect the novelty will wear off pretty darn fast.

Which is why we need to know something about Pence, who only got to be vice-president because he was the only vaguely leading Republican who was prepared to stand alongside the maverick outsider.

So what’s he like? In the succinct phrase of one of my American friends, “even worse than Trump”.

The election result has unleashed a nasty wave of racist, sexist and homophobic abuse across America. Rather like the Brexit vote here, it seems to have given bigots a sense of entitlement to behave in ways that have long been considered unacceptable.

And if – as has been seriously suggested – Trump was only pretending to be a complete bigot in order to win the vote, it would seem that Pence is the real thing. Except that he has spoken out against Trump’s “unconstitutional” proposal to ban Muslim immigrants.

Like Trump, he’s for gun ownership. Unlike Trump, he’s for military interference with the rest of the world, including “getting tough” with Russia. 

He’s for cutting taxes, especially for big business, and against welfare. In that, as in so much else, he’s a far more typical Republican than Trump, who has already stepped back from scrapping every aspect of Barack Obama’s health care plan.

Possibly Pence’s most offensive act as Governor of Indiana was in denying women access to abortion services, even on health grounds. 

Probably the greatest danger he would pose as Presidentis his denial of climate change and enthusiastic support of environmental destruction for cash gain. A madness he apparently shares with Trump.

This may be what revolution looks like, or it may just be that the Democrats screwed up in making the personification of Establishment complacency their candidate. There’s probably truth in both views. 

Either way, whether it’s the dangerously unpredictable Trump or the perilously predictable Pence at the wheel, it’s going to be one heck of a bumpy ride.

For months I've been plagued by a waking nightmare, and it's been getting worse. The same terrifying spectre has been haunting people everywhere. Today could be the day the nightmare comes true.

At best, we will wake tomorrow to find that things are merely bad, not utterly catastrophic.

While the world peeps through its fingers, not everyone in the United States shares the sense of horror - though those who do have most to lose.

No one, not even Donald Trump, could seriously have imagined when it first started rolling that his bandwagon might roll all the way to the White House. Yet here we are on election day with that possibility still horribly alive.

How the Democrats must wish they had chosen Bernie Sanders, rather than Hillary Clinton, as their candidate. Trump couldn't have played the anti-establishment card then, because his born riches and TV familiarity make him more of an establishment figure than Sanders. Clinton, former First Lady, friend of Wall Street, Washington insider for four decades, is about as anti-Establishment as the Queen.

Of those standing, the Green Party's Jill Stein would make much the best president. But you - and the great American public - could be forgiven for not knowing she was in the running. 

In the US it's never really more than a two-horse race. And such is the fascination of the media with Trump that it's been all about him this time - for him or against him - as if it were all nothing more than just another reality TV extravaganza.

Trouble is, it matters rather more than who wins the Strictly vote, or who gets fired from The Apprentice.

On his very first day in the Oval Office President Trump could preside over a bonfire of everything Barack Obama has achieved in the last eight years. 

Because Obama has been opposed by a Republican Senate, he has had to rule largely through executive orders - and the trouble with those is that the next president can simply overturn them.

Trump has promised - or threatened - to crack down on immigration and to order the building of a 50ft wall to keep out Mexicans "in his first hour in office". He may find it hard to finish the wall. He may find it harder to make the US a Muslim-free zone, but as one of his aides says: "He can ban anybody from Egypt, from Syria, from Libya, from Saudi Arabia."

He would certainly make it easier to buy and tote lethal weapons in a land where the verb "to carry" already bears the unspoken added word "guns".

He might well ramp up rivalry with China into full-blown enmity. And though Vladimir Putin is his best buddy right now, we all know what can happen when good buddies of that kind fall out. 

Perhaps most worryingly of all, Trump will be able to renounce the Paris agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. Which would be disastrous for global efforts - already far too puny - to stem climate change.

I say "perhaps" because here is a man who has said he doesn't understand why nuclear weapons shouldn't be used. And who will have plenty of them at his disposal. Enough to terminate life on Earth even if no one fires back.

Another star of reality TV, Joey Essex, said the other day: "I don't know who I want to win. I don't really care. For me it doesn't matter because it's not going to affect my country."

Wrong, Joey. If Trump wins today, the world will be a very different place next year. Different, and scarier. Not just America, but everywhere - including Essex.

Trump's racism, his misogyny, his boasting of sexual assaults - real or not - his alleged financial irregularities, his bare-faced lies make Clinton's alleged naughtiness with an email server look insignificant. Where his sins are many and sordid, hers are incomprehensible to most people, which is probably why he has been able to big them up so successfully.

But all these are petty matters when you think who might soon have his finger poised over the button marked "Armageddon".
 


Meanwhile, back in the Brexit ranch...
 
 
I could fill the paper these words are written for with thoughts occasioned by last week's High Court ruling and the hysterical reaction that followed it. But you're probably sick of the whole thing by now, so I'll restrict myself to a couple of points.

So far from betraying the people - as some papers claimed - the judges placed responsibility where it belongs, in the hands of the people's elected representatives. Those in Westminster, not Brussels. Not an attack on our democracy, but a necessary defence of it.

It will be interesting now to see how much courage and integrity those representatives show. A majority of them were opposed to Brexit before the referendum. And it's generally regarded as a sign of weakness for politicians to change their minds - especially by those pillars of the press who now want them to do just that.

I don't seriously expect the craven bunch collectively known as Parliament to block Britain's departure from Europe. But they should at the very least have some credible say in where we go next.