Cheer up! Donald Trump’s victory isn’t all doom and gloom

Well, it’s just like Brexit, isn’t it? The appalled tone of the BBC six o’clock news, my daughter’s refusal – she’s nine – even to get out of bed, my nice colleagues declaring that they cried, simply cried, at the result. It was everyone’s opening gambit: Can you believe it? Yes, personally, I could. After the last election, after Brexit, I wasn’t surprised that the pollsters called it wrong and I’m looking forward to hearing them wriggle out of this one, like they tried to last time.

This time, unlike Brexit, there was the feeling that any woman who was indifferent to Hillary Clinton becoming leader of the free world was letting down her entire sex – see Madeleine Albright, Nancy Pelosi and the entire pantsuit brigade. ‘You haven’t a sisterly bone in your body,’ said one colleague cheerfully. I dunno, maybe the odd vertebra. But truthfully, the one candidate I thought quite well of in this election was Bernie Sanders, who really did address the question of the corrosive effect of money in US politics and did raise the issue of the income gap.