The Simpsons predicted Donald Trump’s rise years ago

As so often, The Simpsons were years in advance of actual political facts. In the programme about ten years ago, Lisa Simpson, for reasons I have now forgotten, becomes President of the United States. She sits in the Oval Office and is briefed by aides on the mess she has inherited from one President Trump. Trump made the great mistake, she is informed, of ‘investing in our nation’s children’. The country is bust and ‘Our free breakfast program merely created a generation of super-criminals.’

Among commentators on either side of the Atlantic, one of the few to see the coming of Trump was the former owner of this paper, Conrad Black, who knows the man. Now Conrad has a vision. Lamenting the move away from the Roosevelt-Churchill and Reagan-Thatcher relationships ‘which brought the West victory in World War II and the Cold War’, he writes: ‘There are stranger, and far worse, prospects than that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson could rebuild that relationship, with all the resulting benefits of olden time.