Diary – 21 July 2016

These days, you only need to turn your back for five minutes and you’ve missed another horror. The Turkish coup may have been foiled by incompetence, Facetime and people power, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is seizing the chance to consolidate his increasingly authoritarian regime. My friend Ayse Kadioglu, one of Turkey’s brave, embattled liberal intellectuals, compares the bombing of the parliament building in Ankara to the Reichstag fire of 1933 — not in the sense of being a put-up job, but as a pretext for strangling democracy. Our new Foreign Secretary needs to produce more than a rude limerick in response.

In the last fortnight I have made my annual migration from Oxford to Stanford, so out of the Brexit frying pan into the Trump fire. Among the less serious concerns about the Republicans’ presidential candidate is his extraordinary hair. When Trump was questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the US, one wit retorted that the constitution should not let anyone become president whose hair was born in another country.

In Washington, my hosts put me up at the Willard hotel, where Abraham Lincoln stayed and Julia Ward Howe wrote the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ Its ornate lobby has been restored to its former splendour, with scagliola columns and plush settees. I’m told this lobby gave birth to the term ‘lobbyist’, since this is where people waited to grab the Washington politicians’ attention. On closer examination, however, it seems that the lobbies of the Westminster parliament may claim precedence in lending a name to that dubious profession.

I wade through the swampish heat of a Washington summer to have dinner with an old friend. Glancing out of the restaurant window, we see a long column of Black Lives Matter demonstrators marching to protest at the latest police killing of a black man.