The race was tightening even before Friday’s surprise — the news that the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s classified emails was not dead, just resting. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, her lead over Donald Trump is 4.6 points, down from 7.1 two weeks ago.

The presidential duel looks different when viewed from Asia, where I spent last week.

Increasingly, as his presidential campaign flames out, Donald Trump is the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 of US politics — a phone so hurriedly assembled that it spontaneously combusts.

If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.” Those were the key words of Theresa May’s speech at the Conservative Party conference last week. My response — as a fully paid-up member of the rootless cosmopolitan class — was: ooh la la! Welcome to the new class war, Brexit edition.

They should have cancelled United Nations week in New York as soon as the news broke that Angelina was divorcing Brad. Did any family more perfectly embody the hopes of that nebulous but uplifting entity, the international community, than theirs?

The word “snafu” originated as a US military acronym in the Second World War standing for “situation normal: all fouled (or f*****) up”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it was originally “an expression conveying the common soldier’s laconic acceptance of the disorder of war and the ineptitude of his superiors”.

In his prophetic 2012 book, Coming Apart, my friend Charles Murray identified the stark social division that is defining this year’s presidential election.

This is a representative sample of the things said by members of the American elite about last week’s Republican national convention in Cleveland. Ignore it all. Their sneering is just irrelevant noise. The signal was what mattered and, though it was loud (and at times monotonous), it was also very clear.

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure,” Enoch Powell observed. Tony Blair and David Cameron know only too well what he meant, but whose failure was worse? To judge by Britain’s press last week, the answer is clear.