This fake story made me feel sympathy for Donald Trump

There was a great commotion in central London last night. A police helicopter hovered over The Spectator‘s office making a din, police sirens sounded and thudding music rattled the windows. I found out why when I left the office and walked via Parliament Square to Whitehall.

There was an anti-Trump protest outside Parliament – #stoptrump was the theme – coinciding with the (non-binding and pointless) debate inside Westminster Hall, about President Trump’s state visit to the UK later this year. The protest was a very slick affair. There was a massive TV screen broadcasting anti-Trump videos, and speeches blared out over a speaker system. But there was just one thing missing: a crowd to match the scale of the event.

In the square itself, there were hundreds of people – maybe a couple of thousand tops, I thought. (By the way, the Metropolitan Police, who I rang to check, say they don’t give out estimates of crowd sizes, and instead rely on the organisers to give them a number.)