Way to go, Dubya

Boris Johnson, at the Republican convention, says that Bush’s conservative credentials are not always convincing but his optimism is unfailingly inspiring

New York

Come off it, I am thinking to myself. The last time I saw Tuesday night’s Republican keynote speaker was only a week ago. I was lying comatose on a motel bed in North Carolina, flipping from channel to channel, and he arrived, starkers, in a Plexiglass bubble from space. As I recall, he then changed his batteries by carving a hole in his thorax, destroyed much of downtown Los Angeles with a runaway crane and narrowly failed to avert the annihilation of the earth.

It is hard to take a politician seriously when his undraped form has been likened to a condom stuffed with walnuts, and when most of his roles involve him telling rival robots that they are ‘Terminaded’. But the Americans take him seriously, increasingly so.

By some fluke I am in the ‘friends and family’ section of the amphitheatre, only a few feet away from Dick Cheney, and can monitor the star’s reception closely.