So I made £250 betting on Trump to win the presidency. It would have been more, except that every time I got close to topping up my stake, this boring, mimsy, responsible voice in my head kept saying: ‘Now, now James. Don’t be silly. All your sensible friends who know much, much more than you do about politics have been telling you that President Trump just isn’t going to happen.’
One of them was m’learned colleague Toby Young. Until recently we used to do a podcast together. Because it was partly aimed at a US audience, we’d usually chat about the presidential race and I’d go into my crazy spiel about why Trump was the only sane choice; and Toby would patiently explain how silly this was because Trump wanted to disband Nato and we’d probably end up with the third world war.
Toby has now got himself a proper job (working for an education charity), as have most of my journalistic contemporaries. Of late, I’ve begun to feel like the pilled-up, grey-haired rave casualty on the dance floor who hasn’t quite accepted that the party’s over. There I am, persuading myself that I’m the last of the breed, fearlessly relaying truth to power when all the rest have fled the field. But maybe the truth is — or so I’ve sometimes wondered in my darker moments — that I’m just a puerile contrarian raging against reality, when what I should really have done is embraced Remain and rooted for Hillary, like all my more sophisticated friends at places like the Economist, the Times and the Financial Times.
Instead, look at what happened! No, I can’t believe it either — it feels so weird and unnatural I almost want a rerun. Not only was I in the journalistic minority of being right about Brexit, but I was in the even tinier minority of being right about Trump.
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