Donald Trump and Hillary neck and neck! Oh my fur and whiskers!

I started the morning with the BBC World Service, pro-immigrant and pro-Hillary. 'This is bad news' said the newsreader at the end of an item about low black turnout in early voting in Florida, adding as an afterthought, "for Hillary". Some woman is saying "I have seen her comfort children who are scared their parents will be deported." That remark perfectly encapsulates why people who like Trump do so.

Another woman says: "Imagine a president  [Trump] whom it's so easy to rile up. That's a much better point."

It's not the bias so much as the perfectly objective reporting from the Jungle at Calais that shows the essentially pro-migrant point of view of the BBC. The accurate, uncritical reporting of the migrants and the activists trying to help them get into England.

Yet the Jungle doesn't even matter - more migrants than are in the Jungle are entering Europe day by day without discussion, except when activists say they are in some way being mistreated.

If you only follow the news that has happened and ignore what's going to happen you miss surprisingly little. Turning from speculation about the US election the really interesting news today is that 20% of the world's population is on Facebook.

The evening before last a Labour-supporting novelist who's my Facebook friend was deploring 'how they will furnish the White House'. 'Will' not 'would'. I went to Google news and saw the extraordinary improvement in Trump's numbers.

Am I wavering, having decided that he just won't do?

He'd badly damage US prestige. And he's a ghastly man, vain, touchy, self-interested and a demagogue. But he has created and given voice to a very important social movement and would change the zeitgeist. He would be the anti Angela Merkel.

Hillary is much safer than Trump and, after all, I thought Obama was mediocre but OK. Bill was fairly good.

But she is not her husband or Obama. She is very bad news. It will be four years of scandals, but not even interesting scandals. Four years of the emails. I don't know if I have the strength.


She is incompetent. Everything she touches goes wrong. She is secretive, a pathological liar with no democratic instincts.  A globalist, who dreams of open borders. 

President Trump wouldn't require strength - or not in the same way. He'd be rivetting.
It'd be comedy of the absurd. Eugen Ionesco. Or rather black comedy.  Very black comedy, actually.


She'd bore us to death. Except if she intervenes in Syria, as she will. That will be not boring but tragic.

And we all want to see how the BBC takes a Trump victory. And that vulgar Scottish woman, Ruth Davidson. And the luvvies. Oh let's not forget the luvvies. But these considerations are not reasons for wanting him. 

Or shouldn't be.

So at this moment, on balance, I still want Hillary to win although, as one always does in a film, I can't help willing on the underdog.

I don't think Hillary will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, though it's possible, but I do very much hope that Trump has changed politics permanently even if he loses. His winning might be the worst thing that could happen to the movement he has created.

On the other hand, the people who like him are dying off. He might be right that this is the last chance. Leave would not have won a referendum held in five years' time.


An odd final thought. You'd think Trump and Hillary were the worst candidates imaginable but the other candidates, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders, are worse. 

And an even odder final thought, uttered by an Ulsterman to Rafe Heydel-Mankoo: 

"The American election is very confusing for us in Northern Ireland. Donald Trump is the only orange man who is also a republican."