In this climate, Democrats find it very hard to acknowledge the simple realities of Trump’s appeal – an appeal going far beyond his white, middle-American, middle-brow base. Even I began to worry in the final days that Trump might fall short, for two reasons.

I have nothing against Robert Jenrick. I have never met him. I have never read him. And I strongly suspect he has never read Tom Sowell—and that is the point. Jenrick is such an archetypally uninspired Tory frontbencher that he’s earned the nickname ‘Robert Generic’, whereas Kemi has convictions. She has principles. This is hard for generic Tories to take. ‘She doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ I have heard it said.

The more I think about it, the more I think the Joe Biden presidency is Act II – and Donald Trump is not the last tycoon. He’s Act III.

It is true that in 2005 Putin called the collapse of the Soviet empire ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. But in fact it is the tsarist Russian Empire Putin is attempting to bring back from the dead. Peter the Great is his hero, much more than Stalin.

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’.

An almighty clash between tech and politics is on the way

Plus: Bloomberg, Kissinger and me; Hillary Clinton’s Peronist path to power.