Nice Guardian column by Aditya Chakrabortty about the Tories’s political confusion. I particularly like this passage:

The problem with this cabinet is not that they lack ideas for Brexit Britain: not at all. It’s rather that they’ve got too many and most haven’t been baked for long enough. Consider cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom’s demand that Britons take up fruit-picking – while her colleague Jeremy Hunt urges them to train as doctors. Consider the Tories’ various barmy import-substitution plans, such as Liz Truss’s plaintive cry a couple of years ago that Britain imports two-thirds of its cheese and “That. Is. A. Disgrace”. Down one side of the cabinet, free-trade buccaneering; down the other, economic autarky on all dairy products. And on both sides, a preference for factoids over evidence and for blue-sky thinking over anything remotely serious.

Well, well. Fans of P.G. Wodehouse will recognise here some echoes of Roderick Spode, the Amateur Dictator and Leader of the Blackshorts. Spode’s economic policies, for example, included giving each citizen at birth a British–made bicycle and umbrella; banning the import of foreign root-vegetables; compulsory scientific measurement of all male knees; and stipulating that each English county should specialise in its manufacturing industry. Warwickshire, for instance, would specialise in the manufacture of umbrellas. Oh — and the national rail gauge should be widened, so that sheep could stand sideways in railway trucks.

Theresa May’s merrie band are not quite at Spode’s level yet, but they’re getting there.

The New York Times‘s scoop on Trump’s taxes is interestingly provisional. But Trump hasn’t responded. Here’s why:

All the Times has is three pages of Trump’s records from 1995. Everything else is informed speculation, extrapolation, and the word “could,” which appears again and again through the article.

Think about how dangerous that was for the paper. Trump could have released his tax returns and proven them wrong. Trump could have shown their speculation to be mere speculation, and used it as a cudgel to discredit their reporting on his campaign. The Times was far, far out on a limb.

But the Times bet correctly. Trump still isn’t releasing his returns. And here’s what that means: whatever is in his returns is worse than what the New York Times is telling the world is in his returns. The Trump campaign has decided it prefers the picture the Times is painting — a picture where Trump didn’t pay taxes for 18 years — to the picture Trump’s real records would paint.

Yep.

From Nate Silver’s constantly updated summary

Good advice from Wolfgang Munchau in today’s FT.

Here’s a summary of his Five Rules:

1. Do not rely on opinion polls

2. Do not double down when you’ve lost. Come to terms with the fact that

   “an insurrection of sorts is under way against financial globalisation and its institutions.”

3. Do not insult or provoke the voters.

   “After the Referendum, the losing side kept on pointing out that pro-Brexit supporters were older and on average less educated. Hillary Clinton’s infamous depiction of half of Mr Trump\s supporters as deplorable fits the same category. The more you insult the other side, the more you end up driving undecideds into their camp.”

4. Beware of provocation e.g.

   “make sure that former European Commission presidents do not offer their lobbying services to large US investment banks, as just happened with José Manuel Barroso and Goldman Sachs.”

5. Do not scare the voters.

   “Project Fear was a disaster in the UK. If your median voter’s income has stagnated for more than a decade, they are not going to be scared by the threat of a recession….The problem with scare stories is that they no longer work with unpredictable electorates. More often than not they are also not true or vastly exaggerated.”

Great stuff. I’ve lost track of the number of discussions I’ve been in since Brexit in which some or all of these five rules are routinely broken.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing in The New York Review of Books on Tony Blair’s letter to George W. Bush on July 28, 2002, which contained the declaration: “I will be with you, whatever.”

It has taken some people a long time to grasp this. The story falls into place when those words are read in conjunction with the Downing Street Memo written in the greatest secrecy five days before Blair’s promise of fealty, in which Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, reported on his recent talks in Washington. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam,” the memo said, “through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, has been thinking aloud:

Imagine it is 2020. The director of the CIA requests an urgent meeting with the US president. The reason: North Korea has succeeded in making a nuclear bomb small enough to fit inside the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental United States. The news soon leaks to the public. High-level meetings to devise a response are held not just in Washington, but in Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Moscow as well.

This scenario may seem unreal today, but it is more political science than science fiction. North Korea just carried out its fifth (and apparently successful) test of a nuclear explosive device, doing so just days after testing several ballistic missiles. Absent a major intervention, it is only a matter of time before North Korea increases its nuclear arsenal (now estimated at 8-12 devices) and figures out how to miniaturize its weapons for delivery by missiles of increasing range and accuracy.

It is difficult to overstate the risks were North Korea, the world’s most militarized and closed society, to cross this threshold…

Yep. Which is just another reason for being worried about a President Trump.

Christopher Caldwell has a sobering piece in the Financial Times which helps to explain why US mainstream media have been so discombobulated by Trump’s success: they’ve paid no attention to Fox News for all the time that the channel has been broadcasting. But way back in 2009, the then Executive Editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson had warned her colleagues that they were insufficiently tuned in to “the issues that are dominating Fox News”. Needless to say, nobody listened.

Caldwell’s analysis is acute and perceptive. “Fox News’s competitors, with a few exceptions like Abramson”, he writes,

always sold it short. They were wrong to. Fox News succeeded because it was brilliant enough to identify a market failure, not because it was sleazy enough to cause one. Murdoch, Ailes and those who build up Fox News did so by identifying a group of news consumers who were being ignored by news producers. It is only now, in the election season of 2016, that we can see how dire a problem this snub revealed, not just for the media but for the whole political system. It was a sign than the informed opinions of the broad public had ceased to count in American political and social life.

The Fox News people understood that you can’t solve this problem by being “more objective”. When it is being ignored by elites, the broad public prefers opinions to facts — because while everyone has opinions, as the saying goes, facts are increasingly things that get handed down by experts. In short, Fox News bet 20 years ago that the “objectivity” of a nation’s elites could be a kind of bias. The past year’s events in the US show that it has won that bet.

It’s a good piece which, of course, also makes one reflect on the UK. I suppose you could say that, for us, the tabloid press constituted our own version of Fox News.