Smug Hillary Clinton wins the first presidential debate. Donald Trump looks like a plonker

So, Donald Trump was being honest when he let it be known that he hadn’t swotted up for the first presidential debate. He was horribly unprepared, and it showed. The great reality TV star put in a really bad live performance in front of 100 million-odd viewers.

Hillary Clinton was Hillary Clinton – smug, annoying, not half as clever as she thinks. A better debater would have demolished Trump – he gave her enough opportunities — but she did not. Still, she was well-drilled and she sounded professional. Trump sounded incoherent, even by his low standards. He made a complete mess of almost every point. Or, as one Republican insider put it to me in a text message, ‘He shit the bed, rolled around in the sheets, then licked them clean.’

The discussion started on the economy, and this was Trump’s strongest section. Even so, he didn’t exactly win. He laid into Clinton over ‘defective Nafta’, the free-trade agreement her husband made, and spoke with his usual garbled-but-effective rage about jobs being outsourced and globalisation.