The turf | 11 May 2017

The longer Donald Trump sits there the better Ronald Reagan looks, not least because he had a sense of humour. The President who told his aides that he should always be woken in an emergency, even if he was in a cabinet meeting at the time, once declared that he wasn’t worried about the budget deficit: ‘It is big enough to take care of itself.’

There were moments during the jumping season just ended when our Twelve to Follow had me worrying about a significant budget deficit. Sad to say, after several highly profitable years, our Twelve to Follow this winter left us, on a £10 win stake for every run, with an overall loss of £22 compared with the previous year’s profit of £101. It wasn’t that we lacked winners: we had 12 victories from 42 runs, a pretty decent strike rate, and in 29 of their 42 races our selections made the frame. Nor were we unlucky with fallers: we had only two of those all season. The problem was that too many of the winners were at miserable prices: five of them starting at evens or odds-on. Only Modus, at 7–1, won at a proper working man’s price. I hadn’t realised there were so many heavy punters among Spectator readers…

Both Aintree my Dream (on one occasion by 37 lengths) and Cloudy Dream scored twice, and one of Cloudy Dream’s four seconds was to the mighty Altior in the Arkle. Cultivator, Itsafreebee, Ravenhill Road and Truckers Glory also won but our star was Fox Norton. Not only did he win the Schloer Chase at Cheltenham, the Melling Chase at Aintree and the Champion Chase at Punchestown, he lost by only a head to Special Tiara in the Queen Mother Champion Chase at the Cheltenham Festival.