Why Conrad Black was right about the genius of Trump

At least two former Spectator figures understood things about the recent American contest which eluded most commentators. The first is our former proprietor, Conrad Black. Disagreeing with the anti-Trump conservative National Review, for which he writes, Conrad filed a powerful piece at the time of Trump’s nomination: ‘What the world has witnessed, but has not recognised it yet, has been a campaign of genius.’ He enumerated virtually every issue where Trump was nearer to the voters than Democrats, the media, and other Republicans. The second is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, nowadays the Telegraph’s international business editor. In the 1980s, Ambrose wrote wonderful pieces from central America for The Spectator, the only British journalist to predict the electoral defeat of the Sandinista regime. As editor of the Sunday Telegraph in 1993, I sent him as our correspondent to Washington. In that almost pre-internet time when the American media were still in thrall to Washington power, Ambrose was the first in the entire world to carry through investigations into the Clinton scandals in Arkansas and after — Sally Perdue, Whitewater, the death of Vince Foster, etc.