Freddy Gray

Donald Trump either has nothing to hide about his relationship with Russia -- or he is hiding in plain sight, as all good con artists do. What you believe will depend on your political prejudices and how you feel about Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.     The Washington Post's report yesterday that Trump shared 'highly classified information' about Isis with the Russian foreign minister last week has triggered the usual consternation in Washington.

What to make of the shocking news that Donald Trump has fired the director of the FBI James Comey? Senior Democrats are calling it a 'Nixonian' cover up of the Bureau's probe into Trump's links to Russia. It is easy to see what they mean. The abrupt move has strong echoes of the famous 'Saturday Night Massacre' during the Watergate scandal. As Senator Richard Blumenthal put it, "President Trump has catastrophically compromised the FBI's ongoing investigation of his own White House's ties to Russia." It doesn't look good. As usual with Trump, though, it seems impossible to figure out quite what he is up to. If he really wanted to conceal his ties to Russia, why would he do something quite so dramatic? He can't really be that stupid can he?

Emmanuel Macron has won the French presidential election. He is projected to have won by just over 65pc, pretty much the exact majority the polls have suggested all week. So it's no populist surprises tonight, and chapeau to France pollsters. Everybody thinks the French are revolutionary, but actually the Fifth Republic is constitutionally and temperamentally conservative. Macron has won because he is the less immediately dangerous choice. He's a europhile centrist who says all the things global statesmen are meant to say. He's a neophyte but he's also a typical post Cold War politician in the Tony Blair mould. The real story of the French election is not Macron. It is the great disgruntlement in French politics.

Sebastian Gorka is a big man. He has a powerful handshake, a deep voice, and a serious goatee. He’s also deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, and known as the most influential Brit in the White House. He was born in London, the son of Hungarian immigrants, and grew up in Ealing. Yet he seems to identify more with America and Hungary than with Britain. When I ask him if he feels British, he says, ‘As a good friend said to me, and I think this is a quote from someone else, possibly Hayek, “You were always American, you were just born in the wrong country.”’ Nevertheless, the British government, desperate to form bonds with a Brexit--friendly Trump administration, has been eager to claim him as one of us.

Everybody knows that Marine Le Pen can't beat Emmanuel Macron, don't they? What does she have to lose? Nothing, it seems. She has now declared that she will run as an independent candidate, and not stand for the National Front. Marine's move is surprising and clever in a madcap way. Anything that Macron can do I can do stranger, she is saying. Macron has reinvented himself as an outsider taking on the establishment -- even though everyone knows he is a former banker and Hollande economics adviser. Well, Marine is saying, I can pretend that I am an independent too. Macron's greatest weakness is that he was tarred by association with Hollande and the elite French left. Marine's biggest problem is that the FN was still too toxic for the French mainstream.

It's still rather a cheerful vibe at the French ambassador's residence in sunny Kensington this evening. The crowd here would have preferred the exit poll to show Macron and Fillon to go through, but they'll take Macron versus Le Pen, especially with Macron in the lead. There were sharp intakes of breath when Le Pen popped up on screen in second place. But Macron being ahead is good news as far as these Londoners are concerned. A huge number of French voters abroad turned out today – a good chunk of them in London, where people queued up outside the French Lycée in Kensington for up to three hours to cast their ballots. And French Londoners tend to be socially mobile, affluent types -- not the sort of people who vote for Le Pen or Melenchon.

If you want to know where President Donald Trump will bomb next, follow his daughter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IvankaTrump/status/849581431806459904 It's Ivanka's rare outburst and her use of the word 'outraged' that suggested daddy might do something. If she deems something abroad unacceptable, you can be sure the full terrifying force of American power will be deployed to make her feel better.     Ok, I’m being a little facetious. But that is the sort of US government we are dealing with now. President Trump looks a lot like the man his political enemies warned us about: a hothead with command of the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen. Donald Trump will act on emotion – or what he perceives to be popular sentiment.

Perhaps Steve Bannon isn’t quite as all-powerful within the Trump administration as everybody believed. He’s just been removed from the principals committee of the National Security Council. This news has been understood as a sign that Trump’s new National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster is now calling the shots on foreign policy. The spin in Washington is that Bannon’s role on the NSC had been to act as a ‘check’ on the now disgraced former advisor Mike Flynn, who resigned in February, and with the more level-headed McMaster in charge he's no longer needed. It’s also emerged that Bannon has kept full level national security clearance. So what’s changed? Something, clearly, for all the naysaying of White House insiders.

If you believe the hype, Emmanuel Macron is l’anti-Trump. He is what the inter-national centre-left, reeling from the shocks of Brexit and the US election and fearful of a victory for Marine Le Pen in France, is crying out for: a politician who can win again. He is only 39 years old, handsome and radical sounding. He’s not a career politico; he used to work as a banker for the Rothschilds (every-body loves them). He wears sharp suits and he’s written a book called Révolution. Better still, he has a buzzing movement behind him: his ‘En Marche!’ (Let’s go!) campaign has excited trendy progressives. He is not bogged down with formal connections to the loathed establishment.