High life | 9 February 2017

When I was young my recurring nightmare was that I would die and be reincarnated as a polo pony. I squeezed in lots of polo during the years I played, at least three matches per week, mostly in Paris, and I felt that polo ponies had the kind of deal the mass media are now handing Trump. I wasn’t mad about the people I played with either. Back then, in the Sixties and Seventies, fat businessmen who cantered hired good Argentines to carry the can, but picked up the cup after strolling around the field and yelling quite a lot.

Well, now I’m over it, but have an even worse nightmare: that I might return as Trump’s White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, and have to face the outraged and hysterical so-called press corps every day. Never have I seen such a conspicuously bogus bunch of supposedly objective reporters as the rabble-rousers posing as the Fourth Estate. It is amazing that poor old Spicer can understand what they’re saying, as they foam at the mouth with phoney indignation and ever-increasing spirals of hysteria.

Nah, give me a pony’s life any day — at least I’d get some peace and quiet in the stables. Sure, the Donald gives the media quite a lot of ammunition, but it’s mostly promotional puffery. He is, after all, a salesman, a man who is not constrained by exact facts and whose lexicon doesn’t include the word failure.

The press, of course, pretends to be holier than thou, and is not best pleased when its falsehoods and errors are pointed out. I managed to squeeze two American columns out of the item Charles Moore mentioned in his Spectator’s Notes a few weeks back about the double standards of Meryl Streep.