Conrad Black

In the last five years of his life, when I knew Richard Nixon, nothing described him better than Milton’s “calm of mind, all passion spent.” During the most tumultuous political career in American history he had come back many times, but the greatest comeback of all was in full swing. His enemies had seized control of the puritanical conscience of America to slay him, unjustly, and he was manipulating the same national conscience, which was founded on Plymouth Rock and has survived all the corruption and hypocrisy and violence of American public life, and when aroused, is insuperable. Since his political fall, and later his death, polls increasingly indicate public unease about the treatment of Richard Nixon.

Canada has just surpassed even its own previous records for absurd and boring elections yielding predictable and dreary results. Almost inexplicably, Trudeau called this election with the shortest possible campaign. He believed he could regain his majority as a recognition of what he imagined to be his distinguished leadership of the country through the coronavirus pandemic. Like Theresa May seeking a strong mandate to leave Europe and remain within it, Trudeau wanted a strong mandate to take the country on a drastic turn to the left which most people did not wish and Trudeau never seriously outlined. In fact, Trudeau's imposition of the Covid shutdown was far too severe and prolonged. He started negotiating with the Chinese for a vaccine which was soon shown to be ineffective.

The triumphant ululations of the almost unanimous Trump-hating media of America and much of the world did not clarify the late election. An unknowable quantity of harvested ballots came from the mass unsolicited mailing to the wildly inaccurate voters’ listings in Democratic-governed swing states, following a plan the Democrats implemented in hundreds of state lawsuits over three years and then hid under the pandemic terror that their allies in the media propagated. This produced miraculous Democratic comebacks from ‘ballot drops’ in the middle of the night after counting had been paused in several selected states, and it quickly became almost impossible to verify these ballots, mixed in with many millions of others.

Despite the suspension of vote-counting in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, President Trump leads in all of those states by substantial margins compared to the number of ballots to be counted and has almost certainly been reelected, bringing the Senate and some House gains behind him. That he has done this in the teeth of the pathological hatred of 95 percent of the American national political media and Hollywood, Silicon Valley and most of Wall Street is an astonishing achievement. One would ransack the British media unsuccessfully trying to find a trace of the fact that he has had the most successful first term of any American president except Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nixon.

The compulsive and self-righteous bellicosity of the Democratic leaders in Congress over the Supreme Court vacancy has opened an opportunity for President Trump to strike decisively. It is admittedly controversial for a president to fill a high court vacancy starting six weeks before a presidential election, but it is entirely constitutional. What’s more, it has applicable precedents, including most conspicuously the elevation of Chief Justice John Marshall by President John Adams after he had been defeated in the 1800 election. This is not a provocation to justify the extreme belligerency of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The final stage of the election campaign and its result will depend on four factors: management of the balance between demand for police reform and concern for the maintenance of public order; whether there is a significant revival of COVID-19; the swiftness of the economic recovery; and the resolution of questions about Joe Biden’s apparent capacity to serve as president. Hovering above the campaign will be the question of indictments from US Attorney John Durham’s special counsel investigation. On all that has been revealed, crimes will be charged, and Attorney General William Barr confirmed last week that those whose conduct is likely to be judged controversial will be 'familiar' names. But they may not include elected officials and apparently not Biden himself.

The Democrats are taking their stand on the coronavirus crisis in an untenable position. It is like building a defensive redoubt in a valley surrounded by hills in the hands of the enemy (like the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1955, as President Eisenhower warned them). Whether this is tactical stupidity by the president’s enemies or strategic genius by the president or — more likely — a bit of both, is not clear except to insiders. Readers will recall that the Democrats charged out of the gate on the issue of taking science seriously and reacting comprehensively; the president picked up the gauntlet, brought prominent scientists forward, and 'flattened the curve'.

The Nevada caucuses confirm that Sen. Amy Klobuchar has clung to the ledge by her fingernails as long as she could and will almost certainly fall off on Super Tuesday. It also confirms that the end is nigh for the Pete Buttigieg phenomenon, the typecasters’ candidate, a prefabricated person with all the outer ingredients but no relevant governmental or equivalent experience, no fixed beliefs, and nothing but flippant and fluently well-rehearsed answers to all subjects; an articulate facade with nothing tangible behind it. Klobuchar and Buttigieg both have made a valued contribution and if Klobuchar had had more panache, she might have made a strong run for the nomination.

The impeachment of President Trump was unfounded in law and in fact and was never anything but a smear-job organised by the Democratic House intelligence chairman (Adam Schiff) with a pretend whistleblower. Trump asked the president of Ukraine for the facts about the association of former vice president Biden and his son’s activities in Ukraine, not a condemnation; that was not inappropriate. president Zelensky has said there was no pressure, the investigation seems not to have occurred, and the assistance to Ukraine was sent within legislated deadlines.

Sir Max Hastings, whom I engaged as editor of the Daily Telegraph in 1986 and who stayed in that role for about nine years, seems to have installed himself at the head of the rabid mob of journalistic haters of Boris Johnson. In recent pieces in The Spectator and the Guardian he has described Boris as ‘a tasteless joke’ interested only in ‘fame and gratification… a scoundrel or a mere rogue’ (a subtle distinction), and in any case a man afflicted by ‘moral bankruptcy’. Max concedes that Boris is likely to be the next prime minister and preemptively accuses him of conducting a ‘celebrity government as in Ukraine and the US’.