My foolproof recipe for a better world

It is always a pleasure to watch Paris burning. On the surface a civilised country, but scrape a little deeper and France is revealed as a nation of kind of faux-Arabs (aside from that rapidly growing proportion who are actual Arabs): easily incensed into an incandescent toddler fury at real or imagined iniquities, things not working out quite the way that they had hoped. An inchoate existential rage, hilariously — in this case — exhibited by people wearing those absurd yellow fluorescent jackets.

They have latterly realised that their leader, Emmanuel Macron, is a smarmy, loquacious, incompetent idiot with strange sexual tendencies. We knew that all along. We told you to vote for Marine — but you wouldn’t listen, and instead, as ever, made your own histrionic descent into the abyss, following a mock-populist metrosexual snake-oil salesman. You can burn down the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and the Moulin Rouge if you want — I’ve no sympathy. Protest at the ballot box and next time get it right.

This has been a year of protests, of shrieking and contumely and a disavowal of democracy. If you want a different government, or a different outcome — you leftie Americans, you incoherent Poujadist frogs, you arrogant Remainer bores — then when the chance comes, marshall your forces and vote. Otherwise shut up, because your demos mean nothing. And remember, your political opponents have skin in the game too, and may disagree with you. You can’t always get what you want: the signal lesson from this confused and fractious year, 2018.

In a democracy, People Power is what happens in the polling booth. The rest is just chronic flatulence. It would be cheering if, in 2019, this notion was taken on board a little by the furious, the psychotic, the terminally needy, the supposedly dispossessed. The notion that you cannot always have what you want because a greater number of other people may disagree with you.