You would think that a really serious newspaper, a really serious right leaning broadsheet like The Daily Telegraph would, after seven months realise that a man who has topped almost every poll for the Republican Party nomination prior to the forthcoming primaries would have struck some sort of chord with American voters.

The fact that he is not a politician but a businessman, a reality TV star with a larger than life reputation and a habit of “telling it how it is” and a fairly colourful CV would have at least piqued the interests of the solemn if rather pompous conservative young fogeys who pontificate daily from the elevated levels of Canary Wharf.

But it was not to be.

Yes, in the summer months when both the UK and US media regarded Donald Trump as a one hit wonder, an amusing interlude before the big boys like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker came out to play, the DT was full of jokey references and patronising asides. Hacks laughingly described as “US correspondents” performed their regular ritual of cutting and pasting quotes from the Washington Post and New York Times, presenting them as if they were golden nuggets of reportage gleaned from weeks of pounding streets from coast to coast and wearing out their own shoe leather.

All the pundits from left and right, every single self-important media figure and academic and, above all, the ghastly regiments of political consultants and operative who leech off the American body politic – they all dismissed Trump’s prospects with a disdainful sneer.

But as the autumn months got closer and Trump refused to fade the political class and their media parasites fell strangely silent – and so did the Telegraph and its hacks. There was very little reporting of the polls or the massive crowds attending Trump’s rallies because somehow it didn’t quite gel with the narrative of Trump the clown.

Until l he was endorsed by Sarah Palin – and the Telegraph went full frontal. The Telegraph Polly Fillers in particular unleashed their claws, presenting Palin as some sort of shrill, screeching fishwife who had entered the US scene as an Alaskan version of Kim Kardashian via a tasteless TV reality show. That she had been a very popular state governor, an insurgent crusader against a corrupt Republican establishment in the pocket of Big Oil as conveniently omitted.

The Telegraph campaign against Trump finally reached its crescendo with an article penned by former BBC hack Matt Frei, pimping his Channel 4 documentary, sneering at Trump, his supporters and, of course Palin (including the totally false claim that her selection by McCain as candidate for VP lost him the 2008 election). A day or so later one of the Telegraph’s boy wonders, a young man with zero knowledge of US politics outside of watching “The West Wing”, grandly proclaimed as the torpedo that would finally sink The Trumptanic.

At no time has there been any serious attempt in the pages of the Telegraph to present a serious analysis of the key question – why has Trump, derided by the media, the punditocracy and the professional political class, has nevertheless gained such support. There has been nothing about the apparent extent of blue collar support, much of it from traditionally Democrat voting swathes of the electorate or the suggestion that he has a significant degree of interest from black voters. No mention either of some evidence that he has reached across to women and younger voters.

There is, at times, a reference to “anger” about illegal immigrants and their willingness to work for wages much lower than the American born working class. – or social and economic upheaval caused by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to Asia. But the DT hacks never dig deeper into that manifestation of anger or pursue a line of thought that might question the inevitability of such a process.

Above all, our “journalists “are unwilling to confront the truth of the high degree of contempt felt by ordinary Americans for the media and its refusal to raise those issues in print or on air for fear of falling foul of the great god of the comfortably off chattering classes, the god of political correctness – buttressed, of course, by the availability of a cheap immigrant servant class that allows them to live a very comfortable life at very low cost.

A pity, for, once upon a time, the Telegraph really was a newspaper that treated the world seriously. Unfortunately, it has whored itself out to shallowness and empty posturing

Chaos and Violence: How New Year’s Eve in Cologne Has Changed Germany

What should be done? An attempt at complete honesty would be a good start. Germans are not children who need to be protected from the truth for well-intended reasons. And part of the truth is the fact that politicians like to talk about integration but have not yet given any indication that they understand the magnitude of the challenge facing them. Another part of the truth is this: German society is becoming increasingly divided.

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But I was told Trump was at war with women…..

In New Hampshire Donald Trump leads with all sub-categories of voter: Republican and Independents, Men and Women.  However, Trump really extends his overall lead margins with women.

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Surely Cameron is not trying to pull a fast one over those EU negotiations?

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Muslim cleric tells British university students he recommends “light spanking” of women and  supports sex slavery and having more than one wife. Feminists surprisingly silent about this – I wonder why?

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Sorry to disappointment you, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Corbyn, but those “Noble Savages” are more savage than noble….. 

Reading the Daily Telegraph and/or The Spectator, both (reputedly) right wing organs one could be forgiven for thinking nothing much has happened during the period leading up to the Presidential election next November – except for a weekly sneer about Donald Trump. You just wouldn’t realise that for half a year several people have been jockeying for the Republican Party nomination.

Of course within a few days, starting with the Iowa caucus, there will have to be some column inches but the hacks will be operating in the dark without a compass. They have no bearings.

They have no bearings because, of course, reporting US politics is almost always a cut and paste job for the Brit hacks. They check the US media, find out what the pundits and the consultants and the academics are saying – then they alter one or two words and phrases and regurgitate the message to UK eyes.

Only the 2016 race is not going to plan.

It was all going to be so simple. Back in the early summer the Republican Party establishment had it all sussed out. The summer and early autumn would thin the ranks. “Outsiders” like Trump and Carson would flare brightly for a few weeks and then flame out. The young bloods like Rand, Walker, Rubio and Cruz would tear each other apart for the “conservative” vote and then former governor of Florida Jeb Bush, rich with big donor cash and the support of regiments of consultants led by so called “genius” Karl Rove, would come through the middle. By October the media and GOP establishment would be crowning him the unofficial nominee and all would be set for the dynastic clash of Bush v Clinton in November 2016.

Except it didn’t pan out that way at all. Despite all those consultants and over $100m in donations and the support of the official conservative media Jeb never lifted from the ground.

Instead Donald Trump has stolen all the oxygen. Despite weekly predictions of demise from the punditocracy Trump polling lead has been consistent. Attacks from the left and right media have regularly missed the target. Not a single big name media figure has come out in support – and it seems that a lot of ordinary Americans don’t give a damn.

This is why in the Telegraph/Spectator the cover has faded. They can no longer cut and paste what the pundits/consultants/academics are saying because there is very little to cut and paste. Since early December the “experts” have clammed up, scared witless by public mockery of their failed predictions. There is a subdued sneering at Trump but that is all.

What has never appeared in the Telegraph/Spectator is a serious analysis attempting to explain the phenomenon of Trump. It is sometimes put down to anger and frustration amongst older white males but if you look at the thousands who attend the Trump rallies there are a lot of younger folk as well – and women.

There is some evidence of support from previously Democrat leaning blue collar workers and elements of the black community, constituencies in which none of the other GOP hopefuls could hope to gain any traction.

Pennsylvania, anyone?

Of course nothing is certain and casting political runes is ever an unpredictable game. But even if Trump was to eventually fade post February US politics can never be the same. As someone has said he has not only ignored the rule book – he’s ripped it up and written another,

But of course, nobody in the Telegraph/Spectator said that. They feel much more comfortable and cosy with their heads stuck up their own derrieres….

Evangelical Protestant preacher Pastor James McConnell from Belfast is, unlike many 21^st century public figures, not a man given to nuance. Such a character, naturally, fits awkwardly with the modern state which increasingly seeks to discourage vigorous and robust debate. Hand in hand with the legions of the easily offended who patrol social media to hunt out and silence anyone who upsets their sensibilities our political and judicial masters are happy to enact and enforce laws to metaphorically cut out the tongues of those refuse to avoid giving “offence”

Thus Pastor McConnell, as a result of a sermon he preached to his congregation in May 2014 that was also streamed over the internet was charged with improper use of a public electronic communications network and causing a grossly offensive message to be sent by means of a public electronic communications network.

The state sought to punish him for making this statement.

‘Today we see powerful evidence that more and more Muslims are putting the Koran’s hatred of Christians and Jews alike into practice. ‘Now people say there are good Muslims in Britain, that may be so but I don’t trust them. Enoch Powell was right and he lost his career because of it. ‘Enoch Powell was a prophet and he told us that blood would flow in the streets and it has happened.

‘Fifteen years ago Britain was concerned of IRA cells, right throughout the nation they done a deal with the IRA because they were frightened of being bombed. Today a new evil has arisen. There are cells of Muslims right throughout Britain. Can I hear an Amen?

‘Right throughout Britain and this nation is going to enter a great tribulation and a great trial. To judge by some of what I have heard in the past few months you would think that Islam was a little more than a variation of Christianity and Judaism, not so. 

‘Islam’s ideas about God about humanity, about salvation are vastly different from the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell.’ 

Words, claimed the prosecution, deliberately designed to offend Muslims.

Not so, said the Pastor.

no way I was out to hurt them – I wouldn’t hurt a hair on their head. But what I am against is their theology and what they believe in.

But, from the moment he was charged he remained defiant and said that he would not stop preaching the Christian gospel even if the price was finding himself behind bars.

Certainly there were expectations that the state’s aim of shutting him away in a cell would come to pass in this age of tender feelings. But a miracle happened – or rather an equally unexpected manifestation – a justice with common sense in the person of District Judge Liam McNally.

‘The courts need to be very careful not to criminalise speech which, however contemptible, is no more than offensive. ‘It is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances. ‘Accordingly I find Pastor McConnell not guilty of both charges.’

I rejoiced at that judgement. I might or might not agree with the Pastor on what he said. But I would be outside the courthouse clapping the verdict. Not because I supported his sermon – but because I supported his right to preach it. Just as I would be perfectly entitled to then stand up on a soapbox and rip into everything he said.

It is incredibly illiberal for the state to police hatred. Hatred might not be big or clever, but it’s only an emotion. And officialdom has no business telling us what we may feel — or think, or say, or write. Allowing the state to monitor belief represents a brutal reversal of the Enlightenment itself. John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), set the tone for the Enlightenment as an attempt to ‘settle the bounds’ between the business of government and the business of morality. ‘The business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of every particular man’s goods and person’, he wrote. That ideal is now turned on its head. Across Europe, governments ‘provide for the truth of opinions’, and in the process they silence those they don’t like and patronise the rest of us, reducing us to imbeciles incapable of working out what is right and wrong, and of speaking out against the wrong.

A small but significant victory in the fightback against a censorship being imposed by those who consider themselves morally superior to the rest of us. But we must resist the temptation to sheathe our swords.

There will be many more Pastor McConnells to defend…..

A savage cri de coeur from “Lady Magdalene”  in the comments below a typical piece of political boiler plate penned by resident Telegraph hack Tim Stanley bloviating about “politics in 2015”. He’s on the usual DT “polyfilla” duty – filling up a few square inches in a slow news week but Lady Magdalene’s riposte is a searing indictment of  the political class and the parasitic media leeching from its gorged flesh.

Will there ever be a day of reckoning?

 The modern UK The Establishment and their lackeys in the mainstream political parties created did not have the consent of the British people.

If challenged (not that the media will EVER really do that) they would claim they had a mandate for the following:

1. Membership of the EU 2. Post WW2 immigration (ie up to Blair’s election) 3. Uncontrollable mass immigration (post Blair) 4. Devolution, which ignored the majority English population 5. Multi-culturalism

They would claim a mandate because they won a General Election in which the electorate, pre EEC, were offered two very similar parties. And post EU were offered a “choice” of two virtually identical ones. FPTP prevented anything else and if, by an electoral freak it did, there was always the House of Donors and Cronies to ensure that nothing significant changed.

Our so-called “representative democracy” is nothing of the sort. It doesn’t represent the wishes of the people. It legitimises the wishes of The Establishment.

Well now the serfs are revolting ….. at least, a significant percentage of them are.

Cameron got a majority based on 24% – less than a quarter – of the electorate. 75% rejected what The Establishment was offering.

And it’s going to get better (or worse) depending on your point of view.

Because a sizeable proportion have rejected what The Establishment wants for their country and they’re going to continue doing it..

I simply cannnot understand why ANYONE would want their supposedly democratic country to be governed by an unelected, unaccountable cabal of utterly corrupt and incompetent foreign bureaucrats ….. or the likes of Merkel, Hollande and other foreign politicians.

I want my country back. That’s all I’ve been voting for for 15 years now, and if we lose the EU Referendum, it’s all I’ll be voting for for the rest of my life.

I REJECT the UK The Establishment has created. I wasn’t asked. I didn’t want it. And nothing is going to change that.

Amen to that, say I……..