KEEP IT SHORT

“Brevity is the soul of wit” - the wise adage that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Polonius in Hamlet. Will himself practised what he preached as there are few finer masters of the economical sonnet with its blessedly limited 14 lines. As I tumble towards senility, I appreciate more and more those authors, poets and composers who take less and less time and space to convey their no doubt exquisite thoughts or messages.

Take the French (I suppose someone must) who gyrate wildly between the amazingly prolix and the neatly laconic. I recall trying to read Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche in 1969 in the Scott-Moncrieff translation (12 paperback volumes) – one famous single sentence in Sodom et Gomorrhe would easily occupy 1 ½ pages of print. Others complain about how long Madame Bovary takes to die in Flaubert’s classic. Short, sweet and underrated are the beautifully-written novels of André Gide, Strait is the Gate and The Immoralist.  I greatly admire the punchy, arresting style of Albert Camus’s brief L’Etranger, which much influenced my callow youth. Its opening words seize you: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure.”

Albert Camus

         

Marcel Proust

                        

                                             

The Continentals have their novellas but the term is less used in English. Plenty glittering gems qualify: Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray or Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. There is a tiresome tradition in the novel in English to spread and sprawl like bind-weed. It was an early fault epitomised by Sterne’s eccentric Tristram Shandy and much in evidence in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. Dickens redeemed himself later in his great novels and the merits of brevity were well illustrated in his cherished A Christmas Carol. American novelists are perhaps the worst offenders. They adore the blockbuster, the 800-page effusion more useful as a door-stopper than a work of literature. They revel in huge casts of characters, in narrative diversions and endless sub-plots. Thus classically there is Wolfe’s meandering Look Homeward, Angel, while recently Donna Tartt’s The Gold Finch (788pp) has wowed her voracious American public.

More is seldom better and I favour the pithy, short works of the younger Evelyn Waugh like Scoop, the original and engrossing The Bridge at San Luiz Rey by Thornton Wilder, Conrad’s gripping The Heart of Darkness or a brilliant fable like Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Nowhere is my intellectual stamina more tested, and the attraction of sleep more pervasive, than in the opera house. Why are operas so long? Was Wagner some kind of sadist that he thought it reasonable to inflict upon innocent Germans (there must be some) up to 5 ½ hours of Parsifal? I long to shout out “Enough, please stop!” but I know my words would be drowned out by the shrieking of the overfed diva in her helmet on stage. By comparison Mozart is a dawdle, but even Wolfgang Amadeus can go on too long and his only opera of perfect length (not to mention perfect harmony too) is his ravishing Die Entführung.

Stylist Evelyn Waugh

Haiku Herman van Rompuy

      

In fact the palm for economy in literary emanations must be granted to the Japanese, who invented the haiku, a delicate poetic form with 3 themes nowadays compressed into 4 lines. Perfect! It can only take a few seconds to read a haiku – the shades of Homer and Milton please note. To my great surprise I read that the former President of the European Commission, Belgian Herman van Rompuy, is an expert composer of haiku and was nicknamed “Haiku Herman” – our Nigel Farage called the luckless euro-bureaucrat much worse. I now fondly dream of euro-regulations being reduced to 4 lines of pellucid poetic commands!

SMD

26.04.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

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BREXIT; BLOOD AND THUNDER AT LAST

Well, we waited a long time with many an arid exchange, but at last the Brexit debate has caught light with some vital matters being sensibly debated. We have however had to suffer an ineffably frivolous speech from Boris Johnson, stretching a laboured joke about Britain supplying French knickers to our Gallic friends and, much worse, watch President Obama nakedly threaten Britain, while our Prime Minister Cameron looks on, silent and beaming, - a truly stomach-churning spectacle.

Obama on cue for Cameron's Project Fear

Obama was a willing accessory to Cameron’s campaign to paint Brexit in lurid colours, emphasising dangers, darkly referring to the unknown and exaggerating difficulties. The campaign, dubbed Project Fear, intends to give the heebie-jeebies to doubters and potential Leavers. George Osborne produced a Treasury paper, supported by allegedly expert analysis, claiming that the UK economy would be 6% smaller by 2030 (£4,300 p.a. per household) if we opted for Brexit – this paper was immediately christened “the dodgy dossier” and its assumptions derided by the Leavers. Then Michael Gove spoke at length about the liberating stimulus Brexit would bring. He contrasted the negativity and pessimism of the Remain argument with his vision of Britain operating in a pan-European and global market to everyone’s benefit.

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, threw his hat into the ring. He spoke of the current slowdown in UK growth as the referendum looms and the damage to the UK finances that would emanate from Brexit. His words would be taken seriously by the City, powerhouse of the economy, and the Leavers need to make a strong contrary case. Then up popped Mervyn King, retired ex-Governor, who criticised the Treasury paper as “exaggerated” and complained that the referendum issues cannot be reduced to a cost-benefit analysis – it was a judgement on how the UK saw its future- and King has long predicted that the Euro is doomed. King’s views carry some conviction.

Contending Governors: Mark Carney

Mervyn King

 

        

Remainers have their tails up – polls give them a narrow lead, eminent people are paraded to support their cause and Obama’s intervention is deemed influential. We Leavers are not so sure. Obama is entitled to his opinion, but I guess he sharply offended more than he charmed. His gloating remark that after Brexit “Britain would be at the back of the queue for a trade deal with the US” did not play well – and anyhow why should the British listen to a lame-duck President from a country sharing a handful of our values but distant cousins otherwise? Obama speaks for American interests, which are not our interests. By the way, come November, Americans, vote Republican!

Many of the British electorate are in a funk. Their familiar landmarks are missing. No Labour voice – Corbyn inanely advocates a “social Europe” and havers on about his priorities – workers’ rights and global warming (sic!). The Remainer Tories are defeatist and pessimistic, let’s not rock the boat, let’s not upset our allies, let’s not pull ourselves up by our boot-straps. But Masterly Inactivity will never work anymore than Appeasement did.

The Leavers, the advocates of Brexit, want us to retain our institutions and our heritage, quickly being eroded or destroyed by the EU. We are a nation of innovators with a wonderful history, with great universities, Nobel laureates galore and with a resilient, inclusive population incorporating diverse cultures. Of course we have the ability to run our own country in our own way! Eloquent Gove should speak more often, Boris should raise his game with real gravitas and Farage should barn-storm popularly everywhere. Shakespeare saw the danger of failing to act:

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

We will be resolute, we will unshackle ourselves from the corpse called the European Union, we will proclaim and apply the eternal values of Britain. In 58 days we will joyfully vote LEAVE.

SMD

24.04.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

KENNETH MORE and TIMOTHY DALTON: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (22)

[This is one of a series celebrating British artistes who found fame on the stage or in the cinema]

The two artistes I here describe often played heroic roles in a style which changed over the generations. More was the stiff-upper-lip Englishman, Dalton an edgier, more fashion conscious type. Both played a variety of other roles very competently and both gave much pleasure.

Kenneth More and Kay Kendall in Genevieve (1953)

Kenneth More (1914-1982) was the son of a former naval pilot, who became general manager of the Jersey railway. Kenneth was educated mainly in the Channel Islands. An unsettled youth, he eventually first worked as a compere at the Windmill Theatre, home of broad comedy and the then daring nude tableaux. More drifted into acting in the mid-1930s and earned his apprenticeship in repertory in Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Enlisting on the outbreak of war, he saw active service and was commissioned lieutenant in the Royal Navy.

He resumed his acting career, edging up his profession, and eventually was talent-spotted by Noel Coward (who inevitably but unsuccessfully tried to seduce him). In 1952 he had a substantial success in the West End as Freddy, the drunken former pilot in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea playing opposite Peggy Ashcroft. Stardom came in 1953 in the British hit film Genevieve where More greatly amused as the caddish Ambrose, paired with lovely Kay Kendall racing his veteran car against John Gregson on the London to Brighton rally: a very English entertainment. Other bright and breezy comedy parts followed in Doctor in the House, Raising a Riot and The Admirable Crichton.

More as Douglas Bader

However More was already being cast in the heroic mould. He impressed as Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky, the cocksure pre-WW2 RAF pilot, becoming a double amputee after a crash and later a fighter ace before capture and incarceration in Colditz. He was an officer on the Titanic in A Night to Remember (1958), a redoubtable Richard Hannay in a remake of The 39 Steps, a gallant Army officer protecting an Indian prince from mutinous tribesmen, succoured by glamorous Lauren Bacall and dependable Wilfred Hyde White in North West Frontier. He reached his apex of film stardom with Sink the Bismarck! in 1960, playing the naval strategist tracking down the Nazi battleship, causing havoc with British shipping – a flag-waving triumph here at home.

More with Dana Wynter in Sink the Bismarck!

More had been consistently popular during the 1950s but his type was passing out of fashion. He did not have matinee idol good looks and he was derided by some as a typical returning- from-war officer with crinkly hair and a tweed jacket. His acting range was thought limited – probably not a natural Shakespearean thespian nor a kitchen-sink drama ranter.

His film career stalled in the 1960s, dwindling to cameo roles. He had blotted his copy-book, no doubt while in his cups, by heckling and swearing at John Davis, head honcho of the Rank Organisation at the BAFTA awards dinner in 1960. His contract was terminated and he was not given the part he coveted (it went instead to David Niven) in The Guns of Navarone, a global hit. He had TV success in the BBC’s Forsyte Saga playing Young Jolyon in 1967 and with Father Brown. His private life unbalanced him; married for 20 years to popular “Bill” Barkby, he upset family and friends by running off with actress Angela Douglas, 26 years his junior. Their 1968 marriage was generally a success and lasted until his death.

I saw Kenneth More on the London stage in 1970 in the role of Sir Robert Morton, the eminent KC, in a revival of Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy. He was excellent, especially in the dramatic scene he brutally cross-examines a weeping Ronnie Winslow in his own home, calling him “a liar and a cheat” then calls for the papers to be sent to his chambers, taking on the case and intoning – “the boy is clearly innocent!”

A theatre was named after him in Ilford but More was afflicted by Parkinson’s and was progressively unable to work. He died aged 67 in 1982. He may have had a repertoire limited to stiff-upper-lip heroics and breezy light comedy but he played both superlatively and is affectionately remembered.

Timothy Dalton (1946- ) is a much more versatile actor than Kenneth More ever was though his stage persona is less overtly genial.

Handsome Timothy Dalton

Born in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, the son of an advertising executive, the family moved to Belper, Derbyshire where Timothy was educated. Spurred on by seeing Macbeth, he decided to be an actor, attending but not completing the RADA course (1964-66). He quickly found work, as the French king in The Lion in Winter movie and as Heathcliff in a BBC TV version of Wuthering Heights. He played Lord Darnley (not one of his best efforts) in the epic movie Mary, Queen of Scots in 1971, played by Vanessa Redgrave. More significantly he became Vanessa Redgrave’s lover, a tempestuous affair which was to last on and off until 1986.

Vanessa was an attractive woman but over time became a wildly Leftist harridan voicing extreme views noisily and unconvincingly. She was consumed by her belief in the forthcoming Revolution and when Timothy made her choose between him and Revolution, she chose her dismal cause.  She inspired Dalton to study acting seriously and from 1971-76 he worked mainly at The Royal Shakespeare Company. He was to play many of the great roles and his Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew was particularly memorable. Tall, lean, green-eyed and with rather saurian good looks, Dalton was much in demand with the ladies and had various liaisons. He finally married musician Okesema Grigorieva in 1998.

Dalton as James Bond in Licence to Kill

Far from his serious acting, he appeared as Prince Marin in the gloriously camp 1980 comic-strip and sci-fi extravaganza Flash Gordon with its distinguished cast wildly over-acting to a great Queen soundtrack. He became better known and this led to his recruitment as James Bond on the retirement of Roger Moore. He made only two Bond films – The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill (1989) which were well regarded, and his darker interpretation of Bond has endured subsequently. Dalton was now a global star. Although contracted for 5 Bond films, the franchise producers got bogged down in a 4-year legal dispute and Dalton did not renew.

Since then Dalton has capitalised on his fame and was an excellent Rhett Butler in the US mini-series Scarlett in 1994. He has appeared in numerous plays, TV dramas and done voice-overs. He is now 70 and his heroic days are behind him. His career has been versatile and highly rewarding.

SMD

23.04.16

Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2016

COMMERCIAL REALITY

The world is sometimes an unforgiving place and the iron laws of economics are not easily defied. We are basically compassionate people and hate seeing families uprooted, lives compromised and security undermined. Yet the economic prospects of large numbers of people since time immemorial have been at the mercy of “the market”, of supply and demand, of overcapacity or of technological change. The challenge for modern society is how sensibly to manage this inevitable process.

Britain has seen this process in action many times. In the 18^th century a mainly agricultural society was transformed by the Industrial Revolution, mechanising weaving, stimulating coal mining and the production of iron. In time, great industries were developed – cotton in Manchester, wool in Bradford, iron in Glasgow, coal in South Wales. Trade hugely expanded and tobacco, sugar and tea came to be processed in Bristol, shipbuilding boomed on the Clyde and the Tyne – railways spread prosperity around the country, although working conditions in “the dark, satanic mills” were often appalling. By the 20^th century many of these great enterprises were in sharp decline, thanks to competition from Europe and America as the developed world caught up, lower labour costs from Japan, India, Korea and China as they joined the industrial league.

Poverty and overcrowding in early 20th century Britain

Successive governments failed to stem the tide. Coal, shipbuilding and steel were nationalised but still lost dominance, at last effectively collapsing. The UCS shipyard, the Meriden motor-cycle works and other visionary projects quickly failed. Not only basic industries were effected: the British motor industry, once well respected, failed to adapt to changing markets and fell to German, Japanese and even Indian buyers. North Sea Oil enjoyed a boom but excessive oil supply and falling prices has seriously stalled this industry.


Britain is not alone facing these problems. The French coal industry has disappeared too and the German steel production much diminished. Throughout Europe, in Italy, Spain and Greece, large employers have shut their gates forever. In the USA a great steel city like Gary, Indiana has closed down and fabled Motown, Detroit, Michigan is a desert of closed auto factories and abandoned neighbourhoods. Spare a thought even for the demonised UK bankers, devastated by the 2008 Crisis, where the big 4 banks cut 189,000 jobs.

In Britain the hot topic is the fate of Port Talbot a massive steel plant in Wales, losing £1m a day for its Indian owner Tata, who has decided to withdraw from / close or sell the plant. In the present steel slump there are unlikely to be buyers and the unions and the Labour Party are calling for some kind of nationalisation to protect the jobs threatened. This sounds like a bad idea, to invest vast sums in a failing industry. I would expect the Government to encourage and even to incentivise new industries to set up nearby and retrain the 7,000-strong workforce. Probably the sad fact is that the sooner Port Talbot is shut down the better.

Hugely loss-making Port Talbot

We live in a post-industrial world and the steel workers, no more than the coal miners of old, cannot be held immune from economic reality. There are new industries in pharmaceuticals, information technology and aerospace, not to mention the resilient financial services and retail sectors.   Currently the most pampered sacred cow is the NHS. Cameron and Osborne, knowing where the votes are, solemnly “ring-fence” spending on the NHS protecting it from the disciplines of the market. We all love the NHS, I do as a pensioner, but inevitably some hospitals become redundant, departments need to be amalgamated, new equipment bought, the qualified workforce reduced here or expanded there. This vast enterprise needs to be managed carefully and if the taxpayer can spend less on it without damage, so much the better. Yet nurses and junior doctors, egged on by the infamous and militant BMA, squeal loudly for ever-improved pay and conditions, whatever the cost to the public purse or the health of patients.

Noisy but deluded junior hospital doctors

Thus another selfish state-dependant profession joins the teachers and the civil servants as an almost immoveable vested interest, blackmailing the feeble government and squeezing the suffering taxpayer. We must resist or lose control of our finances – quite a dilemma.

SMD,
17.04.16,
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

ON FORM

On Saturday I watched the Grand National on TV and it was won by the unfancied nag Rule the World at 33-1, pipping my lovely wife’s selection The Last Samurai. Rule the World was, as we racing aficionados say, “on the bit”, and he strode out beautifully, not bothered by his inexperienced but thrilled jockey 19-year-old David Mullins and making ecstatic his well-known Irish trainer, who sadly recently lost a son, Mouse Morris. He was magnificently “On Form” – my own selection, highly respected Holywell, fell ignominiously at the second of thirty fences. Naturally my mind turned to the joy of being On Form and its sad reverse.

Rule the World romps home

As this is also the Augusta Masters weekend, we remember other demonstrations and lapses in form. For years Tiger Woods was a worthy Master (4 times winner) almost unbeatable on the luscious manicured fairways of Augusta. Then suddenly his demons congregated and he lost it, now a shadow of the thrilling golfer he once was. We also remember Rory McIlroy in 2011 leading by 3 strokes on the last day and then blowing it with a horrendous final round of 80 - off form with a vengeance. Thankfully he redeemed himself the next year and he remains a great golfer, but this year record-breaking Jordan Spieth blew it on with a 7 at the short 12^th and Danny Willett (of England no less!) deservedly seized the green jacket.

We all know individually when we are on form, the easy fluency and charm, the persuasive arsenal of phrases and gestures finding their target, the warm approbation of friends and colleagues. We go home happy that we have done justice to ourselves; we have performed. Such moments are highly satisfying but they cannot be depended upon. Somewhere in our physical mechanism there is a vulnerable spot, inviting the insertion of the proverbial spanner into our works. Instead of shining, we stutter and haver, our tact deserts us, our phrases sound hollow and empty, our audience look at their feet rather than in our eyes: we know we have failed and we keep awake at night cringing at our embarrassing ineptitude. We should not overdo the agonising – like any other mammal we blow hot and cold, our temperaments have their ups and downs and steering a happy medium through life is frankly boring.

I have some sympathy with David Cameron, who certainly has had a difficult week, what with a row over £9m on an anti-Brexit pamphlet (a Government must be entitled to a point of view) and the furore over his Dad Ian’s past involvement with Panamanian entities. Much of the sound and fury is synthetic or misplaced. Ian Cameron was a stockbroker and of course he marketed shares to a well-heeled clientele: tax planning (the polite term for “tax avoidance”) is part of the warp and weave of commerce. If investment business can lawfully be channelled through tax havens in Panama, Cayman Islands or the BVIs, so be it – it is up to the HMRC to introduce restrictive legislation if they so wish. Until then, keep mum. Pretending that Cameron had some higher duty to eschew the whole area seems hypocritical to me. He is a citizen like any other and if Jeremy Corbyn and his gang want to use this as a club with which to beat the Prime Minister, their driving force seems little more than the politics of envy based on the fact that they cannot abide anyone more successful and richer than they are. Cameron admits he could have handled the matter better – he was simply off-form.

Pantomime not Art with A Midsummer Night's Dream

He is in good company being off-form. William Shakespeare could be brilliant, inspirational and almost life-changing. His tragedies in particular reach the heights of genius. But he has his duds too – I submit The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream respectively too unfunny, too tedious, too gruesome and too fanciful to deserve serious study. Yes, the Bard had his off-days; even in otherwise gripping Macbeth the action is paralysed by the leaden comedy of The Porter’s scene. Did old Will sometimes have a tin ear? Even allowing for the peculiarities of Jacobean “humour”, I think, to borrow Salinger’s expression from Holden Caulfield, Will was “as sensitive as a toilet-seat” when he wrote this scene. Similarly, William Wordsworth cannot fail to move with his matchless poetic diction in The Prelude but he was also guilty on an off-day of composing his ineffably feeble The Thorn.

It is a Monday as I write and we all tend to be slow to warm up on this gloomy day. But I implore you to down that bracing tonic, calibrate your well-tuned physique, think positively, skip outside and scintillate!

SMD

11.04.16              

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

AMERICAN RABBLE-ROUSERS

As we Brits sit open-mouthed, disbelieving and appalled (even if leavened by a tiny frisson of admiration) when we hear the latest pronouncement from Republican front-runner Donald Trump, we cast an anxious eye over our feeble collection of politicians. While Boris Johnston and Jeremy Corbyn are at the foothills of total idiocy, America has a long and proud tradition of demagoguery and quackery of which The Donald is just the most recent and inflated example.

Donald Trump tries to look thoughtful

Trump has the full armoury of the ignoramus and the bigot, hatred of foreigners, especially poor migrants, contempt for women, hostility to “Washington”, boundless egotism and a view of America that would make the most chauvinistic blush. His rhetoric strikes a chord with those alienated by the modern world and by saloon-bar blowhards who find in Trump a kindred spirit. His views were shared by many a predecessor and I mention some now.

The aptly named Know-Nothings who flourished 1854-6 were a grouping of Protestant men who opposed slavery but also Catholics and immigration. They formed the American Party and were strong in Massachusetts, but never found a real leader; their nominal standard-bearer was the ex-President Millard Fillmore, but he was a dud both as President and as rabble-rouser.

Bryan inflames the 1896 Democrats

Much more successful was William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic populist from Nebraska who won his party’s presidential nomination for the elections in 1896, 1900 and 1908. He shot to fame with his championing of bi-metallism (linking the currency to silver as well as gold) at the 1896 Democratic convention with his celebrated speech declaiming You shall not crucify mankind upon a Cross of Gold. Bryan was isolationist, hostile to big business and anti-imperialist. As his political influence waned, Bryan became a star-turn on the Chautauqua Circuit lecturing on fundamentalist religion and opposing the teaching of evolution. Current US religiosity and creationism are his direct legacy. Bryan made a fool of himself in the Scopes trial of 1925 with his dire scientific ignorance and HL Menken penned a devastating obituary of this charlatan on his death soon after.

Enigmatic Huey Long in 1935

                                     

A rabble-rouser from the Left was Huey Long, Democratic governor and senator from Louisiana, who did good works on education, health and infrastructure in his previously neglected state. He denounced the banks and in particular Standard Oil and had a Share our Wealth programme, employing many socialist nostrums, which played well in the Depression. He wanted to control everything himself and ignored inconvenient democratic restraints when it suited him. He was assassinated in 1935 and it is said that this populist was a proto-Fascist and potential challenger to FDR. He has perhaps inspired Bernie Sanders in his wilder fancies.

Nearer the present is George Wallace, adamant defender of segregation, white supremacy and scourge of “pointy-headed” American intellectuals. A former Democratic Governor of Alabama, Wallace won 5 states and almost 10m votes in the election of 1968, a very strong showing. He ran as an Independent with militaristic running mate General Curtis LeMay, whose praise of the use of nuclear weapons was a drag on Wallace’s campaign – Bombs way with Curt LeMay! - his enemies jeered. A would-be assassin crippled Wallace a few years later and he lost his old puissance.

Wallace, with his hooded eyes, had a distinctly sinister aspect and Trump with his baroque hairstyle and often scowling manner can remind us of George, who wowed the Southern white-trash, just as Donald sets the moronic mid-West a-whooping. As we say up North, There’s Nowt so queer as Folk.

Menacing George Wallace

This unlovely tradition of rabble-rousers moves us back to Donald Trump. Let The Donald speak for himself:

 “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud"

 “Ariana Huffington is unattractive, both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man – he made a good decision.”

“You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.” 

 “I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words

 “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best.  They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bring crime. They’re rapists… And some, I assume, are good people.” 

 “Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.”

“All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.” 

 “The beauty of me is that I’m very rich.”

 “It’s freezing and snowing in New York – we need global warming!” 

 “I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” 

 “My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.” 

“I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.” 

"The point is, you can never be too greedy”

Racism, sexism, creepiness, boastfulness and ignorance are Trump’s stock in trade. It is almost incredible that Trump’s only serious Republican rival is the even worse extremist Ted Cruz. So he might easily walk off with the nomination. He would face experienced Hillary Clinton, who can rationally debate the great issues of the day but whose record is pock-marked and whose personality is ice-cold. Unhappy America to have such a choice!

But let the US keep hold of her sanity. Trump in unelectable, wholly devoid of presidential qualities and, to lower the tone to Trump’s level, I pass this verdict – Donald Trump is a clownish wanker, deserving execration and a volley of rotten vegetables hurled at his ludicrous barnet.

SMD

4.04.16

Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2016