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The US election is finally over and the likes of the BBC are shocked, as if nobody saw Trump winning, and win he did. The writing was on the wall when Trump played to a packed house in New York of all places, which was instantly compared to something the Nazis did in the 30s but I'll be honest, it was like something Hitler would have done then it was certainly most racially diverse and pro-Israel fascist rally I'd ever seen, and if playing Maddison Square Garden makes you a fascist, I guess I've ......

Let's start off with a joke: Kier Starmer, goes to a pub and asks for a whisky and the bartender hands him gets a scotch on the rocks, and Kier says "I didn't ask for ice in it" and the bartender says "neither did them pensioners" That also reminds me of the one where Gordon Ramsey goes into a pub, orders a drink, demands to see the manager and asks him if the ice cubes are fresh or frozen.

There was the aftermath of the Israel attack on Hezbollah and you almost have to feel sorry for the blokes interviewing for the vacancies in the leadership positions, when by definition they were considered so irrelevant that Israel didn't include any of them in the 2000 or people they targeted the other week.

There's a quite astonishing pair of headlines in the Telegraph this morning. One is about R Kelly's daughter accusing him of sexually abusing her as a child. And right next to it is one where Meghan Markle is explaining how she was the most bullied girl in the world. In fact no, not just girl, "one of the most bullied people" so presumably even the boys had it better, and that by definition includes all the ones held captive by Diddy, another story for another day.

There have been a terrible pair of hurricanes in the Carolinas and more recently Florida and with a fear of looting, Florida passed a new gun law granting extended conceal carry laws for use in the event of a state of emergency. Those state of emergency include hurricanes, earthquakes, and living in Florida. This was all followed up by a Kamala Harris word salad interview on the show 60 Minutes which was telling in that even the legacy media are turning on her incompetence and her claim to be defending democracy after over-riding the vote, not risking letting the primary voters have a say, and using legal action to tilt the balance of power in various races. A tired and haggard Barack Obama was then trotted out to tell young black men to do as they're told and vote for the mixed race lady, and then there was then a viral and fairly blistering response from one of them explaining that the patronising attitude is exactly why they're all voting for Donald Trump in November - the candidate who favours 'reducing inflation' over the circus that is gender and identity politics. Talking of which, I've got a friend who let me know he's got a data with a girl who self-identifies as a wheelie bin, so I hope he remembers to take her out on Thursday evening.

All political careers end in failure, but with the resignation of Boris Johnson, a lot of speculation has been made as to what he’s going to do with all that spare time on his hands. Perhaps go on one of those reality tv shows, I'd imagine Love Island would be right up his street albeit they likely don't pay enough. He famously lead a very expensive lifestyle and if you ever hear someone claim he’s outstanding, it’s very possibly a bank manager discussing his overdraft. As such I thought I’d do a review of what the last 10 prime ministers got up to when they left office

1) Theresa May has stayed on the backbenches as MP for Maidenhead, even staying on and keeping her seat at the 2019 election so she clearly has no plans. Very much like her strategy when it came to Brexit. There’s not much to say really, she hasn’t published a book although she did get some cash for speaking in America before the pandemic prevented her leaving the country. Curiously there’s been talk about her becoming secretary-general of NATO, and she was recently banned from ever visiting Russia. Not that I can think of many reasons you’d want to go there right now.

2) David Cameron famously bought a shed for £25 grand in which to write a memoir which got decent reviews and he was paid £800k for it. However, his main hobby really got going when he became an advisor to Greensill Capital. He was paid $1m per year for 25-days work, in addition to $60m in share options. He was certainly earning his keep though, he convinced Matt Hancock to get the NHS to use Greensill’s Earnd app and then when the pandemic broke out he convinced the taxpayer-owned British Business Bank to give them a largely unsecured loan of £400m. The whole grubby situation was sleazy enough that they’ve since changed the rules. So along with when he called UKIPs bluff by calling the Brexit referendum, it’s nice to know that he’s largely effecting change by messing things up, although I’m sure his mother and his bank manager are very proud.

3) Gordon Brown stayed on as a backbencher for a couple of years although he spent much of that time becoming involved in the Scottish Independence referendum. Of course his main ambition was to get the top job at the IMF, although David Cameron blocked the idea, correctly seeing that it would be like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank. Brown is famous for two things: [1] being one of the few PMs to never win an election [2] spending 10 years promising an end to boom and bust without realising he was manufacturing the largest boom and bust in the UKs history. He’s spent the last decade doing some laudable work with charities although he himself is paid via a charity foundation that means he doesn’t have to pay tax that would actually help solve the problems in the first place

4) Tony Blair left office and set up shop in the Middle East, possibly under the misunderstanding that the West Bank was a financial institution. He’s earned roughly £100m since leaving office although it always puts a smile on my face when I think about how his career’s work to rebuild the Labour party and be president of a federal Europe was all destroyed in about 3 years thanks to Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage. I remember seeing him interviewed at Davos where he guaranteed a 2nd referendum and it must annoy him that out of a decade’s work (which included things like fixing Northern Ireland) he’s largely seen as a warmonger. He claims to have gone through a religious rebirth since although it’s typically a wishy washy form of Catholicism that includes new age symbols, magic pendants, a belief that the Bible something you can pick and choose bits from, and of course the bit where Vanity Fair claimed he had an affair with Rupert Murdoch’s ex wife.

5) John Major spent the day after the 1997 election at the Oval where Surrey won by 6 wickets which was won of the few victories Major had experienced for years, seeing as how his last years in power were very much like watching the collapse of an English test match side. He went on to be head of Surrey, and later the MCC and wrote a number of well-received books about cricket as well as the usual flotilla of directorships and charity appointments. His main charity appearances seem to be the BBC where he turns up from time to time to moan about Brexit or act as if he is owed respect simply for being less unpopular than Neil Kinnock back in 1992 Curiously he was also appointed a special guardian to Princes William and Harry after the death of their mother albeit the strangest of stories was more when it was revealed that he and Edwina Curry had been having an affair. How did they keep that a secret? Well like one of his cricketing heroes, I’m stumped.

6) Margaret Thatcher in government was polarizing depending on who you were and where you were living at the time. But after she left government, there’s really not a lot of positive things you can say about her and that comes as someone who watched her funeral procession outside St Pauls. She took up a job with Phillip Morris who paid her half a million pounds per year, and also campaigned for the release of Augusto Pinochet and encouraged both George Bush and Tony Blair to invade Iraq. She was quite a cheerleader for Tony Blair who was one those rare few invited to her 80th birthday dinner. Someone else in attendance was her old friend and later foe Geoffrey Howe who summed up how her true post-ministerial legacy was the sheer extent of how her legacy had changed the face of Britain. “Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible”

7) James Callaghan resigned at the end of the 1970s and the winter of discontent, and he stayed on until after the 1980 party conference where they changed the voting system so that Michael Foot could be elected. That same system would years later lead to Ed Milliband being elected Labour Leader rather than his Brother. Callaghan was one of the last vaguely honourable retirements, he was a non-exec director of the Bank of Wales and he was responsible for Great Ormond Street Hospital retaining the Peter Pan rights indefinitely. There’s also an anecdote kicking around that in 1997 a volunteer phone staffer was phoning random party members looking for recruits. Callaghan was asked if he’d thought about becoming more involved in politics to which he responded that he thought that being Prime Minister had been enough.

8) Harold Wilson resigned after a diagnosis for Alzheimer’s disease although he claimed to be exhausted and simply retiring because he was 60. On his way out he handed out a few questionable honours including a Lordship to Joseph Kagan who manufactured his favourite jacket and had a brief stint at tv, hosting 2 episodes of Friday Night Saturday Morning. It’s terrible tv and often listed in top 10s lists of worst shows ever alongside that sitcom about Hitler, that naked gameshow hosted by Keith Chegwin and any episode of Question Time filmed since the Brexit Referendum.

9) Edward Heath spent years on the back-benches complaining about the Rise of Thatcher as both party leader and then Prime Minister, with many referring to him as the Incredible Sulk. Supposedly a meeting between them was so short that Thatcher stayed an extra half hour for coffee with his PPS so that the press wouldn’t cotton onto how badly it had gone. The 1980s saw him watch as the policies of monetarism and privatization went against everything he stood for and he continued to turn down offers of a cabinet position or an oversea role with the UN or ambassador to the US. There’s a lot of speculation about his private life but I guess the less said about that the better although maybe some of us will live long enough to see the private papers being released.

10) We’ll finish this list with Alec Douglas Home, the last PM born during the Edwardian era and the last to have been in the Lords before he took up the role. He got the job when Macmillan was forced to resign due to the Profumo affair which shows how trivial the Boris scandals were really. Macmillan’s defence secretary had been sharing a lady of ill repute with a soviet naval attaché, vs what, drinking some wine a staffer bought you from Tesco? Anyway, there wasn’t much to his Home’s premiership, one of the shortest ever and after a year in Number 10 he went on to spend the next quarter century back in the house of Lords where he’d started. He came from money so that explains things a bit, he mostly spent his retirement fishing, hunting, writing a couple books and keeping to himself. As they say, the past is a foreign country, although if it is then it does make you wonder why Daily Mail columnists keep saying so many positive things about it.

There were a series of elections this week including Scotland (which we’ll get to in a minute) but also local elections in England with Labour losing more seats than Bill Gates will when he and Melinda divvy up the furniture. A wave of condolences of course poured in from their political allies such as the IRA, Hezbolla, Iran and the Muslim Council of Great Britain. Apparently it turns out that voters don’t want to vote for people whose agenda offers very little other than trying to claim MPs expenses, ban the teaching of history in schools, and maybe push for a referendum on rejoining the EU. The end result of course is that even Hartlepool didn’t care to vote Labour, and instead turned bluer than a late night George Carlin routine, or that time that Shaun Ryder went on TFI Friday. That last reference is a very 1990s one but then it has been over 15 years since Labour won an election, that was the year after Arsenal last won the Premiere League, maybe it’s something about wearing red. Peter Mandleson made reference to the party malaise being down to the two Cs of Covid and Corbyn, although most voters looked at the likes of Keir Starmer and saw a third C. The embodiment of a niche lifestyle obsessed with maintaining a rigid class system where the rich people live in London and discuss legislation not in Westminster but in the letters page of the Guardian. And a 2nd, working class kept at arms length that know their place and work for the public sector. If there’s not enough public sector jobs to employ the entire population then blame the tories. If they want to study economics or start a business, they’re a class traitor and if they disagree with the BBC then they’re a racist who hasn’t listened to the podcast that tells them which facts to believe. You know, it’s really kind of difficult to see why this election was in any doubt really, all that needed was for Laura Kuenssberg to call Harlepool for Joe Biden 20 minutes before the polls closed. Kier Starmer’s condolence speech should maybe include giving out his LinkedIn details or handing out a CV but the groupthink of course is that Brexit will definitely start to go wrong at some point in the next 2 years and then, finally, the public will wave the Labour party back into power like they did in 1997. Except instead of Union Jacks it will be a mix of EU and Palestinian flags and maybe Jeremy Corbyn will ride along Downing Street on the back of a unicorn.

North of the Border of course, Scotland is a slightly different animal although ironically the national animal of Scotland is the unicorn. Nonetheless, the SNP maintain a stranglehold on voters who wave flags, except of course for match days at Ibrox when the union flag flies proud. Lots of red, white and blue, especially in the lights of the emergency services standing by. Nicola Sturgeon narrowly failed to win a majority at the ballot box, although that isn’t stopping her demands to have another go at losing a referendum, probably by about 52 to 48% same as the rest. It’s like watching someone feeding Monday into a fruit machine waiting for it to pay out, I guess in that analogy, Alex Salmond would be the guy who quickly runs up and puts in a fiver when Nicola was at the bar. I jest of course, I think the last time Alex Salmond was seen running was when you could probably still smoke in that fictional pub. Either way though, the SNP pitch remains very much like the Mel Gibson film, a fantastic story but utterly lacking in facts or reality when it comes to incredibly basic questions like “What currency will an Independent Scotland use?” Alex Salmond at least claimed it would be the pound, with a joint stake in the national debt, Nicola seems to think it will be the Euro but can’t say so because Spain will say that Scotland would be banned from joining the EU, lest Catalonia get ideas about secession. Here’s a second one, what if not all areas of Scotland vote leave, will Aberdeen and the North East be allowed to hold a second referendum about staying in the UK? What if Orkney and Shetland favour Oslo over Edinburgh? These are seemingly simple questions that actually need answere. They're in that lit of questions I'd like answers to. Others include “If Cinderella’s shoe fit her perfectly, then why did it fall off?” Or “If rabbits' feet are so lucky, then what happened to the rabbit?” Or have you ever seen an interview where the SNP are actually grilled or scrutinised by an impartial and credible interviewer?

Chaos this week in America with videos of a brawl and takeover of the capitol building that were both exciting, yet also slightly dull because normally when you see that sort of stuff happening, someone like Steven Seagal shows up. Or maybe Michael Bay is filming it so for some reason stones and rocks are suddenly flammable because physics in his world makes about as much sense as the concepts like integrity or decency in the world of Washington DC.

As to the violence and bloodshed, the main story for me has been more the fact that supposed Trump-supporting extremists have almost all been identified as hard left activists who were maybe paid to show up and undermine the president's tv reputation further, or perhaps they just like to smash things up and cause trouble. One of them was in Philadelphia a few months ago at a Black Lives Matter protest smashing up the Apple store. Who knows, maybe he thought the senate had some stuff in it worth stealing and to be honest the scenes did also remind me of those clips where you see a crowd running amok inside a Walmart or a maybe walking out of a Target store with a 60" television. Unfortunately the only things for sale in that building were the politicians who'd long since departed. But generally speaking, for all the talk of paid actors and protestors, I'm inclined to think they're more like the sort of England football fans that used to go abroad in order to get into a good fight and smash up the local taverna. The sort of idiots that heard Churchill talking about fighting them on the beaches and took that as an instruction to travel to the world cup and get arrested.

Nonetheless, there seems to be a sense by some the in 2 weeks it will all be over and the country will return to normal, or at least the definition of normal that includes being the sort of place where you can ask for a sandwich and tell the serve to substitute the bread for two pieces of friend chicken. This all seems wildly misplaced optimism on behalf of the left but wasn't it always so? If the election was indeed what they said it was then the best option would be to have an enquiry, answer all the questions, show that the result was beyond doubt and prove to the world the Mr Trump was at the end of the day a somewhat shifty businessman who lost reelection. Instead all lines of question have been shut down, people silenced, livelihoods threatened for daring to ask what in some cases are very legitimate questions. Thing like why are there videos of boxes being brought into the room after the officials and observers had finished up for the day. Why was the count trusted to a company that was donating millions of dollars to one of the two parties involved.

Apparently you're dangerous or racist if you don't accept everything you're told and those lines of question have thus been shut down faster than Jamie Oliver restaurants or branches of K-Mart depending on what side of the pond you want your analogy from. The end result of the censorship and media blackout is that Donald Trump is being actively transformed into not a failure but a martyred man of the people, like some kind of rightwing Bobby Kennedy. The one thing you'd think people would learn by now is that if you want to stop a conspiracy theory the last thing you want to probably do is ban people from mentioning it: that's about as effective as trying to shovel water with a pitchfork. Thus in 20 or even 50 years a solid chunk of the population will still mention that time when the media and the state had no option but to rig an election because it was the only conceivable way they could defeat Donald Trump because he was just too popular to defeat any other way. And personally speaking, I'd probably side with that theory if only because like I said the media have been so suspiciously keen to shut down and ridicule the debate.

The aftermath of the US election has been a sordid mess and one in which the media’s analysis has been about as neutral as a listening to Jimmy Hill commentate on an England game against Germany. Except of course these day’s its former crisp salesman turned football pundit Garry Lineker offering insight on twitter. And just like Jimmy Hill, like many of the people who voted for Joe Biden died several years ago.

At time of recording Mr Biden has been announced as the winner although there are still a number number of very real and deeply concerning anomalies with the voting counts (which I’ll come to in a bit) but from day one the BBC, CNN and their comrades are very actively pursuing the route that it’s all done, nothing to see here, everybody move along so we can get Donald Trump out of the White House and they can claim editorial neutrality for all they want but I’ve seen Tony the Tiger be more neutral about the taste of frosted flakes. The removal of President Trump is a religion for many people, most of whom are unable to actually provide examples of actions or policies that have actually affected them personally. In Britain it’s normally the sort of people that used to protest outside the US Embassy in part because until recently it was located just around the corner from Selfridges so they could make a day of it, then jump on the tube at Bond Street and head back to their 6 bedroom town house.

At the heart of this debacle though has been a number of highly dubious counts in key counties, many of which were Trump strongholds which switched to Biden by a landslide, at least on the ballots that were asking about the white house, remember that there were senate races and congressional districts up for grabs too and indeed one of the main pieces of evidence in favour of the alleged vote-rigging is that the democrats did so poorly in congressional and senate races. Typically the vote counts are the same because voters cast a vote for the same party on each of the ballot slips yet in many cases there are counties that voted overwhelmingly for Mr Biden yet also returned republican congressmen and Trump supporting senators by the same margin as in previous years.

To accompany this though have been electronic counting machines that have been shown after a handful of recounts to have overcalled Mr Biden’s votes by thousands although we have been reassured that these are one-off glitches, yet that same software is being used nationally in 30 states and court cases are being brought to prevent any further recounts. That counting software by the way is made by a company called Dominion Voting Systems and that company previously donated $2m donation to the Clinton Foundation. All things considered, I have as much faith in those numbers being true and accurate as I do of Mr Biden being able to remember what his own name is without a teleprompter or a slip of paper. And the press coverage of the maths reminds me of when when a kid once asked me if I could help them find the number 10 on a calculator.

Nonetheless for me the big takeaway is that in amidst the talk of the white house the main story has been lost which is that the Democrats did not take over the legislature with big majorities in the congress nor senate. Joe Biden and his supporters can talk all they want about raising taxes or banning fracking or re-balancing the supreme court but they can’t do any of. If joe Biden decides to make sign the Paris accord the republican senate can turn around and reassure the public that they will be doing nothing to enforce it and if Democrat run cities were expecting a blank cheque to bail them and their friends out, they might find that the bailout gets calculated by those dubious ballot counting machines. There’s a real sense that places like Chicago and New York have been purposely run into the ground in recent months so that Biden can preside over a democrat-led bail-out and revival to conclusively prove that the country does better when Democrats are in charge. As it the one thing you can say is that Democrat politicians must be in incredible physical shape because that’s a lot of stretching the truth and jumping to conclusions. For now, President Trump remains in office for another 70 days or thereabouts so lets see what he spends the time doing, or what surprises he has in store for his successor to have to inherit.

Couple of big stories this week. First there was yet another terrorist attack in France, and after the terrorist tried to buy C4 explosives and accidentally ordered a Citroen C4, this one involved a knife instead and a beheading. I have to give credit to the French police who kept their calm whilst many others were losing their head. President Macron was already about to start a lockdown for Coronavirus so let's see if whether lockdown curfew prevents Tunisian migrants as effectively as it does Corona, I suspect it will be exactly just as effective, by which I mean "not very" Either way, the roads leading out of Paris are so jammed that you'd assume someone had spotted a German reconnaissance plane.

Talking of analogies to the 1930s, this week in Britain saw a bombshell report condemning the Labour Party of anti-semitism, claims that many of the party faithful ironically blame on a zionist conspiracy to smear Jeremy Corbyn. As if he needed help in that or had ever risked winning an election. These of course are the sort of left wing activists that have hammers and sickles on their Facebook page, but probably don't know how to spell the word sickle, the types of people who become geography teachers in order to have a platform to discuss the geography of the Middle East with impressionable children. A good portion of these people probably read that Corbyn had been suspended, and feared that he'd been suspended by a rope from Blackfriars Bridge just like in that conspiracy involving the Vatican in the early 80s. You have to give some credit to Kier Starmer I guess for at least having a go at turning the party into a centrist party, albeit one the doesn't have any sort of policy or clue what it's purpose is. There's a joke I heard that a man goes into a garage and explains that his car labours in first gear and pulls to the left and the mechanic asks, "what kind of car is it?" to which the owner replies "A Kia starmer"

Lastly to America where the poling day is next Tuesday and if some newspapers are talking about a civil war in the Labour Party then as they say they do things far bigger though not necessarily better in the US. Let's run through the possibilities because all of them are awful

1) A Biden win: this could go 2 ways. If he wins and takes the senate then be prepared for regressive tax and environmental laws at a federal level. Those laws will likely be declared unconstitutional, so the court will be topped up with more judges until they get things passed. Honestly, if this happens I could see a number of states openly ignore the law, and then as they say "we're not in Kansas anymore." Except we are because Kansas and most of the oil-rich south are key contenders for that secession.
2) A Trump win: this will result in years screaming by left about conspiracies and asking why the vermin and dumb hicks in their Obama-voting districts didn't do as they were told this time around. Every celebrity will claim they're leaving, but none will unless you mean moving from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz or, well somewhere within a few hours drive of Los Angeles
3) Perhaps Biden will win but not have the senate this means gridlock: nothing happens for 4 years with the senate repeatedly voting down Biden's laws and refusing to appoint his court appointees. Eventually he retires and 2024 sees a rerun of this election but with younger and far more extremist candidates on the ballot.
4) The vote is contested with accusations of fraud (probably fact-based accusations) from both sides, and with some counties in key states having turnouts at over 100% which is to be expected I guess when both sides are adding ballots to the count. This scenario will of course go all the way to the top where Mr Trump's newly refreshed US Supreme court will almost certainly rule in favour of him. This is where we get to find out whether California really wants to go it alone or not like they keep threatening. And whether the silicon valley types and their money really do want to live under an independent high tax utopia like they've been so keen to promote in the Trump era when it was as likely to happen as their companies being open and transparent.

The other night I was watching a show on the BBC about recycling and landfill and just like a lot of other BBC programming, it was rubbish. So what has been going on?

There's a series of new lockdowns going on around the world as politicians struggle to prevent new Covid cases or in many cases use the news for self promotion. Looking at my home country of Scotland, the government announced that bars would close for 2 weeks although given that people were warned in advance and may have overdone it, I doubt many people would want to go near a bar for a few days after the ban anyway. And at the end of the day it may all just be to help the SNP avoid any new stories involving Alex Salmond meeting new friends on a night out.

Guitar Virtuoso Eddie Van Halen also died of cancer and as someone with a vast collection of vinyl I guess I was tinged with both sadness as well as the thought to put some albums up on eBay at triple the price. His wife said her "heart and soul have been shattered" before a spiritualist asked her to stop stealing Eddie's lyrics

However, the big story was that it's just a month to go until the US election and there's been new stories coming out left right and centre or as the press would rather express it, far left and far right, no centre. This week saw the vice-Presidential debate which compared to the Trump-Biden fracas was somewhat more civilised. Certainly it was refreshing to see a discussion without interruptions like the classic "stop i can't breath you're standing on my neck" which is all to often the case with arguments recorded. Pence came across a bit more professional but it doesn't really matter because the big news is that the President is alive, covid free and back on the campaign trail. Subsequent debates have been canceled because the President suspects they'll be rigged against him and he's probably right but it's probably irrelevant because he comes from the world of television and we have at least 2 major unknown plottwists between now and election day. It could go either way this time, it really could, and I'm yet to wager money on the result but I will say this much: Donald Trump is so far behind in the polls that it reminds me of the night he won the Presidency.

cartoon: trump doesn't start wars. Result, "get rid of him"

They say that a week is a long time in politics but this last one seems to have been longer than the hold time when you try to contact the council. This week we’re talking about President Trump and one of the biggest October Surprises in election history. Maybe not the biggest, that would go to the Russians in October 1917 when Lenin decided to cancel the idea of an election and just kill people instead, a classic Russian election technique still employed to this day.

Let’s stick to America though, this last week started with an election debate that was described as a dumpster fire in which President Trump and Candidate Biden yelled at each other and over the moderator. To people watching in the UK it made for very strange viewing in so much as the braying and childishness was never interrupted by the speaker of the house shouting “order order!” Nicola Sturgeon also thought it was a disgrace because the SNP weren’t allowed a say in the debate owing to English politicians in the late 1700s, notably George III.

Skip forward a few days and on Friday the President announced that he had contracted Covid19, not to be mistaken for Maria19, which is the twitter handle of a striptease artiste living in a trailer park down the road from Mara Lago. Allegedly, hastag grab her by the cat. Anyway, at this news many on the left instantly jumped to the conclusion that he was actually fine and the whole thing was part of yet another conspiracy theory, presumably one that can be easily answered by investigating whether Robert Mueller spent the weekend putting down a deposit on another beach-house. Nonetheless, the situation did appear to be fairly serious and president apparently spent the weekend surrounded by doctors and on a cocktail of drugs, just like Joe Biden did before the first debate.

I guess we won’t know anything for sure for another week although this has been yet another news story where the supposedly compassionate socially caring types have spent 2 days wishing death and pain for the entire family and friends of someone who disagrees with their political views. The irony being of course that were the President to die then he would become a martyr and a rallying point for the next half a century, a conservative president set for a landslide re-election who was cut down in his prime as a last resort throw of the dice by the deep state conspiracy. As compared of course to if Mr Biden caught Covid, in which case the election should be delayed because it's unfair if the left don't have all the advantages they need in order to lose spectacularly.

As the US election draws closer the country appears more divided than the flat pack desk I didn't get around to doing this weekend. It's made a number of commentators ask: what would Abraham Lincoln or George Washington would be doing if they were alive today? To which the obvious answer is scratching at the inside of the coffin as shouting so that someone can let them out. And Lincoln might be looking up that play on Wikipedia to see how it ended seeing as he missed the last 20 minutes.

But yes it's 2 months until election day as we move into autumn or as they call it in America, the "fall" which brings to mind other falls like the fall of Saigon, the fall of the Roman Empire, or that time that Neil Kinnock fell over on a beach because just like Kinnock the US left wing politicians have been trying incredibly hard make themselves seem as unelectable as possible over the past couple weeks. As an analogy, try to imagine the fictional kingdom run by Babar the Elephant and now try to imagine the hunter running for political office in it, possibly with a zookeeper as running mate. That is roughly what you have as left wing mayors champion the abolition of the police and urge you to vote for Joe Biden to speed that process up. Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles and New York are now deserted downtown and regularly witness to scenes reminiscent of the 3rd world and yet for many that is portrayed as a good thing with references being made to South Africa and the end of minority white rule as they actively fan the flames of a race war that frankly matters very little to anyone who doesn't have a financial stake in it. When Democrats say that the country needs immigrants to do the things ordinary Americans won’t it makes you wonder "like what, voting Democrat?"

All the while Joe Biden has been silent on the topic of the riots and so uninspiring that you half wonder whether making him the front-runner was part of a "make a wish event" like when they let a terminally ill patient have lunch with their favourite sporting hero. It's worth remembering that Joe only got the position because the party stooges wouldn't allow the role to go to Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton wouldn't let Elizabeth Warren beat her in the first female president competition. The somewhat confusing (yet inevitable way) the vote was rigged meant that the party activists voted for competence and charisma, yet were left with Jo Biden and for many it's like if you ordered a double bed and the company delivered you a double bass. Except that basses are associated with jazz and cool whereas Joe seems like the guy who'd go to a concert and then complain afterwards that the orchestra was a cover band. Who knows, maybe he's been around long enough to have seen Mozart playing a live gig back in the day. Either way, we currently have 9 weeks to go until we can see which of the two ld white men, both with accusations of impropriety, both running of a campaign on identity politics, gets to live in the White house next year. And possibly a 3 further subsequent years depending on how things go!

This week I thought we'd talk the upcoming American election although I thought in passing I'd point out how good it is with Corona to see the British 'Dunkirk Spirit' coming out by which of course I mean thousands of trapped Britons trying their damnedest to cross the channel and escape France.

But anyway, the US election is entering the last couple of months of what has been the quietest and most lacklustre presidential election since the era when King George III was in charge and the election consisted of a sketch comedy routine performed by courtiers. The usual feverish wall-to-wall campaigning has been a trudge this year as both candidates stumble forward like drunks at closing time, both assured in their own self-confidence and popularity though one of them will of course have a rude and painful awakening come that morning in November.

Up against Mr Trump is Jo Biden who many have accused of being cognitively impaired following a litany of gaffes, mistakes and an ability to mess up numbers that makes you assume he used to have a private sector job at Enron. There's hours of clips on YouTube if you go browsing, including one where he introduces his sister as his wife, although I don't know the context and perhaps he was trying to play to a crowd in Alabama. The Coronavirus has largely saved his campaign by allowing him to remain silent, out of the public eye and hide behind a facemask when he is on display. Gordon Brown presumably wishes he could have shielded his "smile" behind one back in the day.

In order to combat the stale old white man image in an era of BLM, Biden decided to finally appoint his running mate this week, by which I mean the results of the focus group finally came back and they went with Kamala Harris who ticks a number of boxes including the one where she can talk coherently but more importantly the ethnicity one given that we now live in an era where it's likely a matter of time until someone demands that the piano is redesigned to have an equal number of black keys and white keys. This is a week in fact in which Nasa decided to rename some star systems such as the Eskimo Nebula in case it was offensive to the Inuit, though strangely no mention yet of renaming the planets, the roman god Jupiter has a pretty offensive backstory after all and the whole Roman empire itself was based on slavery. Until the Visigoths held a peaceful protest in the year 410 and accidentally burned it to the ground.

Despite this I find it somewhat bemusing when you look at the facts. Joe Biden carved himself a career in the 80s and 90s by passing legislation now seen as disproportionately harsh on minority groups. But it's ok because Kamala Harris is only half-white although she and grew up in a white neighbourhood and married a white man and was one of the first to be kicked out of the primary race by the public earlier in the year. This is a PR effort somehow worse than the usual election effort, in which a multimillionaire candidate decides to remove their tie and slowly drink half a bottle of Coors Light while chatting to a voter in the Midwest. Sometimes I wonder if US politicians brought in Prohibition simply in order to get out of having to to do that part of the campaign.

Either way, the lack of anything to get excited about in this election is why there's so little action or enthusiasm on the ground, there's no grassroots groundswell and nobody's leafletting or knocking on doors and Covid is nowhere near as responsible for that as the Biden camp would make out. Morale and is always a strange one to tie down though, after all if the people who make motivational posters are so motivated, why are they still working in a poster factory?

Two stories to cover this week, first an update on Coronavirus, or "Covid19" as it's officially called. Don't worry if you missed the first 18th episodes though, they're probably on Netflix. Right now though things are continuing to ratchet up in terms of seriousness and do remember that when you read the official government numbers, you should double them, just as you would if you were quoted the cost of a large government project, or the number of times Prince Andrew claims to have met someone. All in all it's shaping up to be the most viral thing to come out of Asia since that Gangnam Style video a few years ago, although I'm not sure how things compare between those locked down cities in china, versus the virus infection rate of the suspiciously cheap Huawei phones that are manufactured in those cities. One bright side for travellers though may well be that if you're looking to book summer flights prices are pretty low now. Also, if you're one of the thousands of people quarantined on various cruise ships around the world, it must undoubtedly be annoying, possibly scary, but if you signed up for the open unlimited bar option, you'll be reaping the benefits. Unless it runs dry in which case that would of course be the time to panic.

The other main story of the week has been in the US where a number of candidates have finally dropped out, leaving it for the most part a 2 horse race between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders to take on President Trump. A bunch of egotistic old white men in their 70s, very much like going to a Rolling Stones gig, except that at least the Stones can guarantee a sell out crowd and you're less likely to be assaulted for wearing the t-shirts after you've left the venue. There's a lot of animosity on both sides of this debate and whoever comes out on top, we're set for a campaign in the autumn that'll be tougher than a $3 steak.

I say 'whoever' but the truth is that the Democrats, as like last time, will rig the rest of the campaign to guarantee Sanders looses, thus handing the nomination to Joe Biden. And for all the expression says "if you’re cheating then all you’re cheating is yourself" then how a friend of mine is banned from the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas?

This weekend in America it's the next round of the Democratic selection process and at the time of recording, I can't tell who's going to win because predicting the future is not a superpower that I possess. And if I could have any superpower? That would probably be the Roman Empire in the 2rd century. Let's take a quick look at the 5 main candidates though

1) Joe Biden - He's the candidate that the establishment are hoping gets the nomination. He's Obama's old VP, has decades of experience, he's saltier than tourist swimming in the dead sea and he's polling miles behind because clearly nobody learnt anything from 2016. But on the other hand he is an old white man with numerous accusations of lewd impropriety which makes him an excellent match for President Trump.

2) Bernie Sanders - He's the frontrunner, very left-wing, a US version of Jeremy Corbyn. He plays well to his base but then so does Piers Morgan or Ed Sheeran, it doesn't mean he's popular with the general public and even a lot of unions have refused to endorse him. More worrying is his age, he's 5 years older than George Bush who ran for office 20 years ago and so keep a fire extinguisher handy because if he mysteriously dies in his sleep, the internet will probably catch fire.

3) Michael Bloomberg - The billionaire has so far done dreadfully but he has spent $400m of his own money on this and he has the support of Hilary Clinton so he could very well buy the nomination. He has an emerging litany of offensive quotes and has faced attacks on the grounds of racism and sexism, but as I said he does have a lot of money and he is really good friends with the Clintons. If you've ever seen a seamstress stitching something up, you probably have good idea where the race is heading

4) Pete Buttigieg - a small-town mayor from Indiana who's only real claim to the crown is being less awful than the past 3. He's comically out of his depth but will likely be be the vice presidential nomination, partly because he can lend his endorsement, and partly because strangely he's yet another candidate with a letter 'B' initial in his name and in the superficial branding-based world we live in, that alliteration is worth far more than it should.

5) Elizabeth Warren - The female candidate would could maybe have won last time around but is probably a bit late now. She's also the only ethnic minority candidate in the race now, being 1/10 of 1% native American, after a DNA test spectacularly backfired and destroyed her backstory in a way that few people had seen since the days of the Star Wars prequels.

So those are the 5, one of whom may become president, or may lose in hilariously embarrassing fashion. Personally speaking, for me the greatest US President was William Henry Harrison, because after taking office he got sick, died almost immediately and therefore introduced no new laws whatsoever.

Two major news stories to come out of America this week leaving president Trump happier than that time that he found a loophole saying he didn't have to hire any of the idiots on that tv show of his.

The first main story was the acquittal in the senate impeachment trial, much as that result was never in any doubt, I've seen romantic comedies with more twists and suspense, joking of course because I don't want those sorts of films. At no point did anyone expect Adam Schiff to turn around like Columbo, say "one more thing" and pull out a surprise cassette recording. There was no sign of Perry Mason with a partly crumpled photograph and Angela Lansbury from Murder She Wrote lives in Maine, not DC. To this day there has been no evidence provided to substantiate any of the claims made by the house democrats. Whilst it is true that no witnesses were called, that is equally in part due to the Democrats not being willing to cut a deal that would also have seen their people called to the stand, not least Jo Biden who went on camera a few years ago to boast about cutting aid to Ukraine in order to get a prosecutor fired, the same thing that President Trump was alleged to have done. The whole thing became politicised when the house insisted on closed door hearings with no public reporting so with partisan lines drawn down the middle any attempt to impeach the president was bound to fall apart faster than one of Prince Andrew's many elaborate excuses.

The second bit story this week was the Iowa Caucus, an event where the crowd of people wanting to run against the president hold a popularity content in Iowa. It's already contentious given that it's not very representative of the US demographics, it's a small rural state and it's lucky that the number of registered voters finally now outnumbers the number of candidates, given that the scores of potential contenders has finally narrowed down to half a dozen. Nonetheless, this year was an unmitigated disaster of epic and hilarious proportions as the smartphone app designed to count votes broke and still nobody knows what the result actually was. All of course claimed a victory and if the Democrats were trying to avoid accusations of political correctness gone mad, the vote resembled one of those primary school nonsense sports events where "everyone" is declared the winner. The person who came out of it best was probably Michael Bloomberg who chose to stay away and focus on the other upcoming poll in South Carolina. Nonetheless it made the party look about as professional and organised as one of those internet videos where people hold a fist-fight to see which of them will be the first to get inside the Wallmart. All part of the comedy of errors I suppose, after all they only have a few months to decide which of them will embarrassingly lose to the President in November

Boris Johnson has been re-elected and Jeremy Corbyn has resigned after being shown to be as popular on the doorstep as that childhood joke where you set fire to a paper bag with a dog poop in it. I thought this week I'd look at the online Labour reaction, using the 7 stages of grief framework.

1) Shock
When the BBC Exit poll first came out, people were astonished, to see something on the BBC saying something positive about the Conservative Party. It was surreal, like watching an episode of Through The Keyhole where Lloyd Grossman broke into the house before making off with the contents.
2) Denial
The denial part is where Corbyn Supporters saw the results and assumed that there must be several hundred Labour contituencies to declare. Even several days after all the counts are long done. Even putting Dianne Abbott in charge of the recount couldn't have fixed things though because the real denial though has been over the past 4 or years though, denying that Corbyn is unpopular outside of London. Denying that Brexit is happening, Denying the time of day to anyone that disagrees. That brings us to
3) Anger
Anger at traditional Labour voters who were apparently too brainless to do what they're told. The internet is a pretty dark place, just look at the anonymous comments underneath news stories about Prince Andrew, many of which are darker and more evil than the crimes being alleged. But the worst anger is reserved for the idiot, stupid, racist, bigoted, simpleminded scum that refused to vote for their local candidate who had cancelled a wine tasting and flown in all the way from Highgate to visit them.
4) Bargaining
This is where they think that it will be ok because the EU has the power to cancel Brexit, or the court system will intervene or maybe half the conservatives will still in principle be in favour of a 2nd referendum like that time Rory Stewart wanted to start a new parliament run from the upstairs room in a local pub. This sort of stuff is probably the most delusional part so far, more than that nonsense about putting Clive Lewis in charge of the nations broadband or banning airplanes or thinking that the British Army should spend the spring writing handwritten apology letters to Gerry Adams.
5) Depression.
Yes a lot of Labour students are depressed but the most depressed people surely are Theresa May who just witnessed Boris do what she couldn't, as well as Nick Clegg who knows that Boris is there for 5 years thanks to the rules that he put in place and the referendum that he spent years in opposition agitating for. There will be bearded man handing out presents this Christmas, but it won't be Jeremy Corbyn, although I suppose some Labour activists will take solace with the fact that St Nicolas was from the Middle East because everyone knows when a Turkish immigrant enters your home in the middle of the night it's because society is racist and the system (and you specifically) forced them to do it.
6) Testing.
This is where you finally "seek realistic solutions" which in political activism terms means the usual rubbish: Britain has changed for the worse and they're going to escape it and emigrate. Obviously they're not but it's important to suggest it so their friends know how liberal and left-wing they are. Actually, I will give Tony Blair some credit when it comes to this: fake mid-atlantic accent, 5-star hotel stays in Davos and a tan that makes him resemble the Cuprinol man, he's at leas made a decent go of staying as far away from the scene of his crimes as possible.
7) Acceptance.
This hasn't happened quite yet, the party isn't there, and be until a new leader takes control and does a full-scale review of what happened. As a shortcut guide though, 3 important questions to ask any Labour leadership candidates would be: "Was Bin Laden a goodie or a baddie?" "Do you think that Mossad controls editorial decisions on The One Show?" and "Do you know how to eat a bacon sandwich?"

It's been a very busy time of year for letterboxes, between the Christmas Cards, the election pamphlets as well as the usual assortment of local takeaway menus. Those places are presumably hoping to cash in on people burning their Christmas dinner and order in pizza, chicken wings and lamb kofta.

Those pamphlets though, there's only a couple more of them to come as it's just the last final couple of days before the election and I imagine for MPs it must feel a bit like being back at school a few days before the big exam. I say exam singular because having seen them going up against the likes of Andrew Neil, or just random members of the public, I'm not sure how many of the current roster of MPs have more than one qualification. Then again, I guess you do have the couple of hundred who got unto university by relying on their father wearing the right tie to the open day and there's those who whose understanding of figures and numbers doesn't go any further than knowing what a treble 17 on a dartboard is in the Sports & Social bar. I guess maths is also useful when you need to calculate how many postal votes you need to run off on the photocopier in order to win a marginal seat in the west midlands.

At this stage people already know who they'll be voting for so really the whole campaigning thing is a charade because everything will come down to a few couple of key constituencies and what the turnout is which will largely be determined by the weather. I don't know who I trust less really, political forecasters or weather forecasters. My take on it is a 22 seat Conservative majority but Boris loses his seat, because polling in his London Uxbridge is a lot tighter than people have been led to believe, especially with Brexit on the table. I'm half toying with putting £20 on Michael Gove being in number 10, pretty sizeable odds for something that's not too outrageous a possibility.

But don't worry fans of elections because the juggernaut that is the US Presidential election is coming down the road with a scale and a cost and a four year regularity that puts Star Wars to shame. But I'm sure we can get round to talking about that in the next, 47 [!] weeks...

I always have a bit of a laugh looking up the latest headlines and seeing what nonsense the BBCs website considers news. Example, "Could invisible barcode revolutionise recycling?" to which of course the answer is "could I care less?" Well the apparently the answer is yes I could care less about certain things, namely the ins and outs of the Labour Party manifesto because thanks to an week of political ineptitude, it has about as much chance of becoming reality as that dream I had where a Zebra won the grand national.

The Labour party had a dreadful week, with contradictory press releases, public heckling, a series of candidates facing legal challenges as well as prospective MPs suggesting more approaches to Brexit than there are stars on the EU flag. Although most online activists would rather concentrate on that other flag with a star on it, the blue six-sided one.

The week also saw Jeremy Corbyn asked which terrorist he'd like to invite to Downing Street if he won which I'll admit would at least make for an interesting episode of Come Dine With Me. There was a story put out suggesting that he'd suffered stroke earlier in the year and was now merely a figurehead for the machinations behind the scene, a bit like the old Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in his last year, although presumably Corbyn would like to be seen as a bit more left wing than Leonid.

Two possibilities therefore exist: [1] the conspiracy one, in which the campaign is now being deliberately badly run so that he's forced to step down on grounds of 'ill health' before a new and fresh Labour frontrunner promises a government of national unity and they romp home with support from the SNP and the LibDems.

Possibility [2] the Daily Mail wants to sell newspapers, to make money [!], and the campaign is just really what you'd expect when its run by 20-something year old activists fresh from university, whose only experience with the public was when they read about them in a book, and who probably think the coal strike was something about trying to save the environment.

Hello again everyone and apologies about being on hiatus the last 2 week, I was on holiday without access to a laptop, which is presumably the same sort of expression that I imagine the Americans will use to describe Julian Assange's extradition to the US ("on holiday without a laptop") before he mysteriously disappears. On the other hand, it's not as if we missed much, it was mostly another two weeks of procrastination as Westminster sat around doing nothing before I arrived home and they decided to agree to holding a December election.

The Brexit deadlock, October edition, saw Boris achieve the impossible task, no not that of a sensible haircut, but that of getting a much better deal than anyone hoped for. Then it was of course voted out by the MPs because at this stage they've backed themselves into a corner where they'd only rubber stamp a Brexit deal if it ignored the referendum and committed to full European integration. No matter how sweet the deal Boris was able to get, it was always going to bombed more than the RAF over Dresden.

And so finally with Brexit stalemate metaphors running low the MPs have finally decided to toss the dice at an election in December with the outcome almost certainly decided by how many people the Brexit Party put up and whether the public vote tactically. There's a lot of talk about the Leave vote being split but frankly if MPs are as keen as they've been to defy their party, is there any Brexit-related difference between a pro-Remain conservative winning his seat vs is being won by the opposition. In all honesty I think the main story in the whole shambles has been that 50 or so MPs are stepping down. And many of them got about as much say in their removal from office as JFK did.

While the UK awaits the election results in the Prime Ministerial ballot, the Democrat party in America is also in the process of choosing a leader and the US, as always, is very keen to show that it does things differently, just as it spells things differently, uses different plug sockets and turns up to world wars towards the end of them rather than at the beginning.

This week saw a bombastic 4th of July celebration in Washington DC with stealth bombers, fighter jets, fireworks and a series of a awe-inspiring stories of military daring read out by the President in a speech that carefully straddled the legal definition of "non partisan" in the same way that a book on horoscopes call themselves "non-fiction." Most people know what's going on. Nonetheless, those wishing to face the president next year have to compete with one another to oppose everything he says, good or bad and so most went out to vilify the president for paying tribute to military veterans before going on television to express how they're the one best able to oppose America values and for a party that apparently opposes the 1% they're certainly coming up with policy stances that are only popular with 1% of the population; it makes them look like the sort of person who would visit a casino roulette wheel and bet everything on blue before being corrected, assuming the owners of being white supremacists and calling it a conspiracy run by Fox News.

A British equivalent would be if Jeremy Corbyn had only gone vegan in order to distance himself from bacon sandwich eating Ed Miliband but had then gone further and run on a platform of making non-veganism a criminal offence, oblivious to the fact that even the hardline Saudi police only execute people if they've been buying pork.

Recently there was a debate where most of the candidates raised their hand when asked whether illegal migrants should get access to free healthcare, many want to abolish the border with Mexico entirely, there are those from cities who want to ban cars in rural areas, folks from the sunny deep south but on the left who because they're from Florida think it's a good idea to ban central heating systems in Michigan and Nike were recently forced to remove a shoe from sale because it featured the original US flag, on the grounds of racism despite Betsy Ross, the flag's designer, being one of the founding members of the abolitionist movement.

It is a profoundly odd thing to see a party go so out of its way to alienate the public and choose a more unelectable leader. I mean at least Theresa May went to the effort of lying about being a centrist

What’s been going on in the world this week? Well I could tell you all about my addiction to reading books. But that's another story. What has been going on is a round of votes to decide who will be the next leader of the Conservative Party and therefore the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The post is actually still held by Theresa May who is being about as pro-active in the legislative process as she’s been for the past 2 years: in the past week she managed to pass three times as many Brexit bills as she did last year, because 3 multiplied by 0 is still zero.

Anyway, the new PM, that choice has been whittled down by the MPs from a pool of narcissistic attention seekers to Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, both of whom have been eyeing the job for years although for those who are not members of the Conservative Party, never mind parliament, the past few weeks must have been similar to an American watching the cricket world cup, but with Radio 4 rather than the dulcet tones of Test Match Special. The two candidates will now be looking forward to yet more posturing as they make their pitch to the conservative membership. If you are one of the lucky ones then I suppose you’ll be receiving your polling literature with the mail, and if you don’t read the Daily Mail then it will likely arrive with either your copy of the Telegraph or the Sainsbury's shareholder magazine. Either way, make sure that if you’re voting for Jeremy then you spell his name correctly, because he's had problems with that in the past.

Once the winner has been announced then tradition holds that the Queen will ask that person to Buckingham palace. The new Prime Minister will later sit at the table with the most powerful woman in the realm, Arlene Foster of the DUP. At which point we either have Boris deliver Brexit, or Jeremy Hunt wasting 12 months on a renegotiation, even though we already know that it will be about as productive as a liberal arts student using music to prove that some squares have 3 sides.

A wipeout for Theresa May this week in a set of local election results worse somehow than the quality of the services being provided by the councils in question. I think it was best summed up by two Conservative spokesmen, one of whom said the night had "gone downhill" and the other of whom described it as an "uphill battle". That wordplay is precisely the sort of disconnect you'd expect though, the Prime Minister believing that the public are annoyed her repeated failure to get a Brexit deal where we get to stay part of the EU. The party could have lost yet another thousand councillors but the numbers are irrelevant, it's like troop losses during the 1st world war and explaining the true situation at this stage in the game is like trying to explain how ironing boards get wrinkles in them. Although the European elections next month will of course offer a fresh perspective on things. It's like the Rudyard Kipling poem about how if you can hold your head whilst others around you are losing theirs, then perhaps you've not fully grasped the seriousness of the situation

To me the main observation was that the prime minister was heckled by a member of the public shouting "Why don't you resign?" and when he was removed and Mrs May's supporters, whoever they are these days, shouted "Out! Out! Out!" the prime minister actually thought they were shouting at the hecker

The prime minister's sole existence and purpose for office is to force the UK into some kind of deal, however diluted, that enables it to continue paying money to Brussels in order to avert the economic disaster promised if the UK were to leave. A promise as trustworthy as the before and after photos on a slimming commercial. At this stage in the process, I don't think that the Prime minister is even being duplicitous, I think she looks at the ludicrous projections of 10 million people being unemployed and, like a naive teenager at one of Jeremy Corbyn's rallies, actually believes everything. I think she genuinely believes the scare stories because the alternative would be to admit that she'd surrounded herself with fools and wasted both her career, reputation and the best part of 5 years. 5 years and counting; alas I'm looking at the calendar and it may well be the start of May, but it won't be the end of May for quite some time, if you see what I did there.

This weekend marked 100 years since the end of the 1st world war and therefore it's also the end of 4 years of seeing the Sunday papers lazily padding out their pages with archive articles. Don’t worry though folks, it’s just one year until we start seeing 80 year commemorative articles about WW2. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, but it's not new. I guess a lifestyle and opinion journal calling itself a newspaper is a legacy thing, like the Carphone Warehouse, or SNP member swearing allegiance to the “United” Kingdom with the sort of honesty that I’d expect from a dodgy car mechanic or someone who says they were only visiting a strip club for the free buffet.

So what has happened in the news? Well last week I said that not a lot would happen in the US election and in many respects I was correct. Sure the Democrats took control of congress, but not by anywhere close to the margins that people were talking about. They also failed to take the senate and the Republican Party actually gained a seat in Indiana. There was no blue wave, Ted Cruz kept his seat and don’t forget that with Brett Kavanaugh installed and another 2 years of potential changes by the senate, the Supreme Court will likely be conservative leaning for the next 20 years or so.

Holding on to all parts of the US government is like trying to capture a shadow and the US system is purposefully designed to prevent legislation that isn’t agreed upon at all 4 stages. So be prepared for a year of nothing followed by a year of people running for president in 2020, something that actually sounds more tedious than the aforementioned ‘year of nothing’. Sure the house could go down the road of impeachment all it wants but they don’t have the senate so it’s a bit like 2 blokes in a pub discussing what car they’d buy if they won the lottery. In my mind the interesting thing to come out of the election, asides from local ballots like Michigan legalising marijuana, is that the new congressmen don’t actually take those seats until January so we might see the incumbents happily passing all sorts of crazy laws in the next month or two, safe in the knowledge that they won’t face any electoral consequences. Sort of like when David Cameron delivered the Brexit vote before heading of to the countryside to write a book and drink wine rather than doing any real work.

It's a very exciting couple of days coming up in America. Asides from a National Sandwich Day and National Donut Day fast approaching it's also a massive mid-term election on Tuesday. I looked on Google and apparently Sunday 4th is actually "National Common Sense Day" but rest assured, that will all be forgotten when people on both the right and the left go to the polls to vote in a 2 party system where a brutal combination of districting, voter suppression and an electoral system about as honest as Piers Morgan mean that, in the end, everything will most likely be decided upon the votes of just a handful of people. Which if it sounds familiar is because it is. In the UK it's the same method as how Arlene Foster decides (on a day-to-day basis) whether Theresa May can remain in power or not.

My favourite expression in politics is "The tyranny of the status quo" and for all the talk of blue waves and millennial voters, I really don't think anything major is going to happen. Elections are always decided by swing voters, so really this mid-term comes down to the question of whether anyone's changed what's left of their mind since 2016. If, for instance, you're a Democrat voter, you should reflect back on whether you've used charm and persuasion to convince some Trump voters to switch sides this time around. I imagine that entrenched voters are as likely to switch sides as I am to order a vegetarian roast when I visit a pub. Do not be mistaken, this election will completely be decided by who gets closest to 100% of their core voters to turn out to vote.

The thing is that outside the voter bases, a lot of people really don't really care about the Mexican border or transgender rights in schools, although they do care about potholes and whether their schools have working air conditioning. America might now have an official 3rd party but it does have "don't know don't care" and it's a lot bigger than people - on both sides - are willing to admit. There's probably a lesson for other countries in there too.

Whenever you have a vote to decide something, the losers generally try to undermine and question the result, whether it be something like the EU Referendum result, or a more contentious issue like when work colleagues go for lunch and the one person who doesn't drink decides that they'd sooner admit to selling company property on eBay then have to split the bill evenly.

This takes us onto the topic of the recent election result in Zimbabwe which is being contested by the opposition, who in this case have also been the opposition for the past 37 years owing to the manner in which Robert Mugabe ran the country. I say unique, it's not terribly unique in that part of the world. The Zanu-PF ruling party has claimed a victory with 50.4% of the vote 50.4% of course being the same number as the daily rate of inflation there a few years ago as well as the expected number of years that the new president will likely serve, once he's had time to amend the constitution and destroy his political opponents with the sort of violent ferocity you'd more associate with Diane Abbot and a chocolate flapjack.

Going back to Zimbabwe though the main take-home for me was that if they had - as is alleged - rigged the vote then the opposition would likely have received 40% of the vote compared to Zanu-PF's 85% of the vote. As many a party spokesperson has said in that situation, stop thinking about the numbers, you'll only make your head hurt, especially once we've battered it in with a club in a government holding cell. At least you can be glad that if you're lucky enough to live in a rich western country then the worst you have put up with is the constant barrage of social media or the BBC and, actually, no, I'd frankly rather live in sub-Saharan Africa with no television then have to watch Neil Kinnock being interviewed about Brexit again.

The US has spent the week watching the President Trump/James Comey/Stormy Daniels stories continuing to move along with the sort of pace normally more associated with a snail, or a car in London ever since they closed half the roads for bicycle use only. I think the plan is that if Robert Mueller's evidence doesn't turn out to be conclusive enough, Trump will have already been in office for 8 years so he'll have to legally vacate the White House anyway.

So let's talk about London though. There were local elections this week and Jeremy Corbyn had spent weeks planning his next moves and what to do after Labour managed to seize councils like Barnet and Wandsworth as well as all those towns and cities that the metropolitan types only hear about when they're watching Match Of The Day. Unfortunately, things didn't really go according to plan and it was a surprisingly good night for Theresa May, that's an expression you rarely hear about these days.

The Conservatives took control of Barnet council along with Plymouth and other decentish wins all over the place. Although the big story of the night was really the revival of the Lib Dems, Vince Cable was even sighted on television without his trademark hat on. It says a lot that if you've see a LibDem politician on television in the past 6 months, it was probably a BBC4 documentary about the Iraq War. Nonetheless, they made good gains in London and you can't fault them, at least they're honest about what they stand for. Compare and contrast with UKIP who depending on the time of day are either a protest vote, a Brexit lobbying group, a tax write-off for donors, a way for Henry Bolton to meet young ladies or in some cases actual politicians with local policies they want to pursue. Unfortunately UKIP is a lot like many other acronyms, in that you have to look it up on the internet to find out what they stand for. The problem with ideological parties generally is that for the most part they don't get enough numbers at the ballot box to win power, but the problem for parties with no ideology is that they end up with Theresa May, the political equivalent of that DVD player you keep meaning to stick in the spare room on give to charity.

When it comes to news, this week has been more packed than Boris Johnson's vocabulary or Dianne Abbott's lunchbox. We finally got some headway on Brexit, HR McMaster was sacked and France had another terror attack: woowzers and I thought my local supermarket was bad on a Friday

But in the background has been the slow burning social media data story involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. At first I thought Cambridge Analytica was the stage name of one of President Trump's former girlfriends, or current girlfriends if rumors are to be believed. But it's actually a fairly dull number-crunching sort of a company based near London's Canary Wharf financial district.

During the 2016 US election, they essentially collected and analysed voter data for the Trump campaign which would normally be fine, they're a political data insight company and that's what they do, just like how Bloomberg provide financial data or how the Daily Mail's website provides all the news data you could ever need, assuming that your main interest in current affairs is focussed primarily on gossip, celebrity fashion, diet advice, and columnists complaining about how the new blue passports will be manufactured in France. Although personally I'd rather we got them made in Catelonia or somewhere else in Europe with a strong separatist movement, just to inspire them on a bit.

Cambridge Analytica though, from what's come out so far the naughty part was that they got access to everyone's data because they lied and told Facebook it was part of an anonymous academic study, rather than a key part of gaming the US electoral system for Donald Trump's political benefit as well as their financial benefit. It's sort of like if I walked into a BMW showroom and drove off with a car because I lied and said I was from head office and we were using it in an advert. Except Facebook is also a company whose business model is that it makes money by selling data, so if you're annoyed about them giving/selling your personal information to Cambridge Analytica then it's sort of like if you were the owner of that aforementioned BMW dealership and the chap taking the car for a spin was that chap out of Ant+Dec who got charged with drinking driving this week. Whether it's Facebook or otherwise, trusting a private company and it's shareholders with a lifetime of sensitive and often embarrassing personal information makes about as much sense as going on holiday and trusting Damien Hurst to look after your pet shark.

Normally when there's a "Russia update" it's means bad news, just ask Napoleon. It's often the one of worst kind of updates you can get, just short of that update that pops up on your computer constantly demanding that you upgrade Adobe Flash.

So to this week's Russia update when Robert Mueller put out a report naming 13 Russians who supposedly set up a troll farm in order to sway the result of the 2016 election. My favourite part of the report was when it talks about the Russians financing the construction of a cage large enough to hold an actress portraying Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform. It makes it sound like an amateur theatre group but they actually had a budget of a million dollars a month and that's more than Trump was spending on hair products at the time. You'd think with that kind of money the Russians could just drive down to Wallmart if they needed to stock up on cages, presumably along with some computers, snacks from the food aisle, energy drinks and of course some humorous political bumper stickers to put on their truck before the drive back to their HQ.

On the other hand, this conspiracy ultimately boils down to a dozen blokes posting bad things on facebook about Hilary Clinton. And it's worth noting that they started in 2014, two years before the election and for a long time they were mostly posting things in favour of Bernie Sanders who at the time was the more obvious "anti-Hilary" candidate in the race. Actually, forget what I said earlier, my favourite part of this whole thing is that the troll farm called itself the Internet Research Agency and they abbreviated that to the "IRA" implying that they were so incompetent that they couldn't use their internet superpowers to figure out that the name was already taken. Or perhaps the conspiracy is just a lot more far-reaching than I've imagined and that the Russians were also responsible for forcing Gerry Adams out of a job and installing Mary Lou McDonald in his place in order to make trouble for the British.

Big political moves in Westminster and Alabama this week; two places that don’t often have much in common although if you’re a politician from the West Midlands and fancy a holiday to America, why not spend a week at the Hilton in Birmingham - Birmingham Alabama that is - and try submitting the 1st class airline ticket as an “honest mistake” ?

But first let’s discuss the Brexit vote in Westminster. Essentially the parliament will now get to vote on whether they like Theresa May’s deal or not. It’s like the end of a dinner party when the host asks the guests what they thought of it but still refuses to disclose what type of meat was in that stew. But the powers in Brussels are certainly happy enough to move onto the next stage of the talks. They eat frogs legs and raw chicken though so who knows how the second stage will go.

That vote though, according to the press it was the result of a betrayal by capricious tory rebels akin to something out of a John le Carré novel, and now the Labour Party will get the chance to race in on horseback as saviours at the end of the process to vote down the deal and prevent Brexit. Or at least they would be, had the date not already been placed in law and were the EU not already moved onto planning a more federal post-UK Europe. It’s a fact that in around 18 months the UK will now either drop out with Theresa May’s deal, or the likes of the LibDems and the more metropolitan wing of the Labour Party will win their vote and thus deliver a WTO rules Hard Brexit. And a few days later, event at that stage, the Labour Party will no doubt put out a serious of contradictory statements about the future of the customs union with about as much coherence as a Diane Abbott attempting to read the football scores.

So now to the US. This week saw Roy Moore loose his run for the US senate seat in Alabama and the deeply conservative stage chose their choice of spokesperson from the same party as Hilary and Nancy Pelosi. That’s the kind of End-Of-Days black swan event you might imagine featuring in a montage in a disaster movie. But we live in odd times, Scotland has several Conservative MPs after all. But this was more a condemnation of the system. Moore shouldn’t have been the candidate in the first place but not enough people cared during the primaries to kick him off the ballot and once his name was there, they were stuck with it, like a badly installed bathroom. In all honesty I think in the longer term it was probably a good result for the Republican party. If he’d won, the Democrats would have used him as the mascot for their campaigning next year to destroy what was left of Trump’s powerbase. It’s a bit like how in 1992 the Conservatives won a narrow victory but the resulting 5 years destroyed what was left of the Party’s soul and public credibility. They ultimately paid the price for that win. Perhaps if the likes of Jonathan Aitken had lost their seat in ’92 then things would have been very different in ’97.

So it's the morning after the night before and we got a shock result. Theresa May thought it would be a rubber stamping exercise, like getting your passport renewed except it was more like one of those awful bank applications where you have to supply 2 utility bills and then you're declined because due to a typo

Hats off to Jeremy Corbyn though, he didn't actually win a majority but he sure as heck managed to defeat the Blairites in the Labour party and that might mean we've finally seen the last of Tony Blair, until he eventually ends up on trial at the Hague. Corbyn got the youth vote out against the odds and especially in spite of Dianne Abbott who spent the last 6 weeks making Corbyn and Abbott look more like Abbott and Costello. Noticeably, Labour's uptick in the last few days directly coincided with her putting an end to her endless series of car crash tv appearances. I saw a programme the other night and I wasn't sure whether it was an interview with her or a documentary about Ayrton Senna.

The Lib Dems having lost most of their target new voters to Labour are pretty much exactly where they started but with Vince Cable back, the political equivalent of firing up that old computer in the spare room and upgrading it from Windows 95 to Windows 98. In Scotland, the SNP also got bumped back to reality with Angus Robertson and the big fish himself Alex Salmon losing their supposedly safe seats.

UKIP and the Greens as usual got hundreds of thousands of votes but next to nothing to show for it, yet more proof that we need proportional representation: it's about the one thing that Caroline Lucas and her greens actually agree with Paul Nuttall on asides from not shaving. We'd probably have proportional representation already were it not for Nick Clegg backing it a few years ago, fulfilling his roll as Harbinger of political disaster.

And so that just leaves us with the madness of a minority administration in Downing Street. I'm posting this on Friday morning and four questions remain that I suppose may be answered by the time you're watching this. 1) Will Theresa Resign? 2) What happens with Brexit now? 3) Will Boris finally make a proper grab for the leadership? 4) Will anyone ever be able to afford a holiday abroad now that the pound is falling faster than the odds of a 2nd election in the next 12 months.

If you live in the UK, then there’s just one week to go until the election. That means 7 more sleepless nights until we find out whether Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott will be in charge of the UK’s anti-terrorism policy. It’s a scary thought and in all honesty, I’d place more trust in that tiger that ate a zookeeper over the weekend in Cambridgeshire. In an odd twist of events this weekend also saw police in Florida arrested Tiger Woods for drink-driving and for a while I briefly misunderstood what had happened.

But to clarify, Tiger Woods didn’t kill and eat anyone, although Jeremy Paxman did have a go at chewing over the party leaders in a series of interviews that frankly didn’t reveal a whole lot. Theresa May muddied the waters around about the so-called Dementia Tax and the Labour team continued to be vague about the IRA and whether Osama Bin Laden was a goodie or a baddie. Frankly, I wish Michael Howard was somehow involved in the campaign just so that Paxman could finally get to the bottom of whether he’d threatened to overrule Derek Lewis back in the mid-90s.

There are of course other parties though, the LibDems, UKIP, Plaid Cymru, the Greens and in Scotland, there’s also the SNP or as it’s more formally known, Her Majesty’s Nicola Sturgeon. So for now, keep your political wits about you because on June the 8th the nation decides. And as Vladimir Putin might add “and zat nation ees Russia!” Only joking of course, even he couldn’t make much of a dent in those poll numbers.

We’re halfway through the election campaign so I thought we’d take a look at what the various parties stand for, seeing as how we’ve not had have Ed Milliband chiseling anything onto a demented novelty gravestone this year.

The Conservatives are frankly miles in the lead following Theresa May’s media strategy of keeping Boris and all other the Gaffe prone MPs away from a microphone. She’s also promising to deliver on Brexit in order to finally put and end to Nick Clegg who increasingly resembles one of those Japanese soldiers that were still up in the mountains decades after the war had ended.

Labour wants to pile money into schools and hospitals but the biggest spending commitment is probably the suggestion of bringing both the post office and the railways back into public ownership, although that might actually be doable seeing as how Corbyn winning would trigger the mother of all stock market crashes and all those Royal Mail shares would then be very cheap for the government to buy, and I doubt Corbyn could do worse than Southern Rail

The Green Party manifesto is mostly made up of all the things that Jeremy Corbyn thought were a bit too left wing for Labour but say what you will I suppose the Greens do have an honest view on where they stand with regards to Europe. It seems a bit inconsistent though, seeing as all the European stuff people enjoy like sports cars, chorizo and cheap flights to Spain are the same things the green party wants to ban.

Also in the pro-EU court are the Liberal Democrats who don’t like Theresa May’s decision to trigger Article 50 and think that the public should keep getting a say in it at every opportunity until they get it right. Not to be outdone, the SNP also want a second Brexit referendum and a second Independence referendum too. Both of them also promise more money for schools, presumably because with all that extra voting, local primary schools will need to spend money upgrading their parking facilities.

That just leaves UKIP who want to make sure the Conservatives don’t go soft on Brussels. And for those like me in a boring safe seat looking to waste your vote, the Monster Raving Looney Party have quite a good manifesto this year; they think that the UK should exit Europe but go further and join the Duchy of Cornwall to benefit from tax exemptions.

This week I thought we’d take a look at France: they take a more laid back approach to life there and are sometimes slow to copy things that the UK did years ago, like modernising employment law or discouraging children from smoking but this week they were quick to crank up the election fever just like us and soon we’re going to have a new French President sworn in – before the UK’s even had a chance to vote. And unlike the UK election, nobody knows who’s going to win the French one. So who are the candidates?

Emmanuel Macron would be the youngest leader since Napoleon. He’s fanatically pro EU and big business which, this being France, means big government, crony capitalism and helping to run the economy into the ground. Think of him maybe as a French David Milliband except with a glass of wine instead of a banana. Unsurprisingly he wants “transformation” which the kind of lazy undefined slogan that people go for these days supposedly and he’s never held public office but he was a former economic advisor for President Hollande which I suppose is like if you were applying for a job as a Theresa May’s hairdresser you let her know that your previous clients were William Hague and Ian Duncan Smith.

Marine Le Pen I think we all know, she’s the populist “Trump” style candidate running on a platform of opposing people who aren’t French enough. Policy wise, she’s the candidate described by the BBC as ‘Far Right’ which, this being France, means by BBC standards she’s to the center left on almost every issue. Workers should have to work less, they should be be paid more and they should be able to retire earlier. In many EU countries they manage to actually achieve this by scamming Germany into bankrolling it but Le Pen is also very anti-EU so I’ve no idea she intends to pay for any of it.

Anyway, overall if you had to compare it to the Westminster election, imagine that on June the 8th you went into your ballot box and the only 2 options on the card were Jeremy Corbyn or Caroline Lucas, except that one of them was also wildly islamophobic for whatever reason.

One last thing, there is one good policy from Macron I think we’d all agree with: namely he’s pledging to cut the size of the French parliament by a third. Maybe that’s one idea that Theresa May might want to think about copying…

So it’s 5 week to go until the next general election after Theresa May decided take everyone by surprise, very much like a school teacher posting a surprise test on the first day back. If it was a surprise maths test, it really wouldn’t be looking good for a lot of people in the Labour Party although the they do know a lot about “Division” and Dianne Abbott knows about “pi” and, oh dear, Ken Livingston just read the word “Axis” and he’s off on another rant about the war…

Back to the election, it’s likely to be a scene of unmitigated disaster in some constituencies. For a good metaphor, look at those very same Labour constituencies on a Friday night when Weatherspoons closes. The kebab shop represents Labour’s manifesto, in so much as nobody knows what’s in it. That the bloke peeing into a phone box represents most people’s reaction to the establishment. The guy not being let into a nightclub is Tim Farron because neither the bouncer nor the electorate recognise him. The girl getting undressed in a back alley is actually not part of the metaphor, she’s just someone that Boris Johnson bumped into when he was up north campaigning.

Long story short though, we can all look forward to June the 8th as election day, unless you’re the SNP in which case the replay is scheduled for August, November and possibly next January if they can get the high court to back their demands for a rerun.

Last week I finished watching the HBO show “Westworld” and this weekend I started watching the final season of America.

Yes, this weekend, Mr Trump finally became President Trump, and that was really about the end of it. No major crowd trouble, no gunmen, no Miss World flash mob for the new emperor. After signing some papers with a gold felt tip pen and checking that Obama had remembered to redirect his mail, they all had a meal and went home for the most part. I was hoping that maybe Trump would order in Pink Floyd to sing from their seminal album The Wall but apparently Roger Waters and David Gilmour hate each other more than Hilary hates The Donald.

For now, if you want to learn more about what goes on inside the mind of the new President, why not go online and buy one of his many books. According to my Amazon recommendations, those who browsed for his latest book, also browsed for rope and a stool.