The Spectator’s Notes | 11 July 2019

When I last talked to Sir Kim Darroch, he was a slim young private secretary, so it was a long time ago; but I can categorically state that President Trump is wrong to call him ‘wacky and a very stupid guy’. His particular sort of mandarin ‘Rolls-Royce mind’ intelligence does, however, amount to a form of stupidity when confronted with Mr Trump. Intellects like Sir Kim’s are slower than those of ordinary mortals to spot Trump’s communicative genius. They cannot see that it keeps him ahead of the game. It is really remarkable that a 73-year-old man can be such a master of forms of social media which did not exist until his sixth and in some cases his seventh decade. The chancelleries of Europe and the mainstream media see the President’s tweeted outbursts or comments shouted beside a helicopter as ill-judged. They falsely equate what they don’t like with what doesn’t work, and therefore they lose. A Trump tweet can be as decisive an expression of power as the Roman emperor’s thumbs-down in the gladiatorial arena. So it has proved.

‘Britain not ready for no-deal crash-out, claim experts.’ That was a newspaper headline I saw a couple of weeks ago. It unconsciously encapsulates the Remain mindset. You cannot, by definition, be ready for a crash-out: if you were, no crash would be involved. It is psychologically very important for some Remainers that no deal must remain as terrifying as possible and nothing must be done to make it less so. Philip Rycroft, another of our supposedly impartial public servants, was, until March, charged with exiting the European Union. On Monday night, he told BBC Panorama that no deal would be ‘a very abrupt change’ (abrupt? haven’t we been working it out for more than three years?) and is ‘fraught with risk’.