Presiding Spirits

I have always supported a State Visit, or even just a working visit, by President Trump. The demonstrations against it would define this country's culture and politics for 50 years, which would be the rest of my life. But if, and only if, they were organised and headlined by the people who had been just as vigorously opposed to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and who would have been just as vigorously opposed to Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, Craig Murray takes apart Emmanuel Macron, who is the President of the French Republic by default, because all that he had to do was beat Marine Le Pen, whose party is not really a party at all, but a separate country, more than 200 years old, calling itself "France", believing itself to be France, and these days more or less accepting the borders of France as most people understand the term, but having little or nothing in common with it, and certainly standing no chance of ever winning a national election within it.

As for the "Special Relationship", America's only one of those is with Saudi Arabia, and even that has not always existed, nor will it always exist. The idea that countries have such affinities merely because they speak the same language, or even because they have also inherited relatively similar institutions, is the kind of thing that only children believe. It is held in the most perfect ignorance of the history of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States until well into the Second World War, and in the most perfect ignorance of the history of every continent, of the Arab world, and so on.