A field guide to our doomed liberal elite

The latest and perhaps most damaging accusation to be levelled at Donald Trump is that he likes his steaks well-done and accompanied with tomato ketchup. He was seen ordering exactly this dish last week. It would not surprise me if he also had a side order of battered onion rings.

I do not know if the person who cooked the steak was an immigrant and, this being the case, added a gobbet of alien phlegm to the griddle. If so, Trump didn’t seem to mind. He chomped away, dipping bits of incinerated meat in his ketchup, quite unconcerned that over here in Blighty a new sneerfest was rapidly getting underway. ‘The man’s a monster,’ someone tweeted. ‘He eats like my toddler and acts like him too,’ some dappy woman commented. You give your toddler steak? How does he like it? Au point with béarnaise and a crisp side salad (along with the ketchup)? I think we’re back dealing with the liberal elite once again.

The journalist Mick Hume has just written a book about that very thing (the liberal elite, not how to eat steak) and been eviscerated for it by denizens of the, er, liberal elite. No surprise then. The book is called Revolting: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy And What They’re Afraid Of and concerns itself principally with the establishment reactions to both the Brexit vote here and Trump’s victory in the USA.

First to stick the boot in was some woman called Helen Lewis in the Sunday Times, who either did not understand the book or — more likely — wilfully misunderstood it. Then it was our own Nick Cohen, reviewing the book for the Guardian. Nick was never going to like it, because he is, first, a staunch Remainer who was appalled by the vote last June and since then has been railing with increasing fury about how we’re all going to hell in a handcart as a consequence of that democratic decision.