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Digested week: Desperado Brits come to finally realise Trump has no need of them

Monday

Spare a thought for the grifters. Those sad Brits who have spent years toadying up to Donald Trump in the belief they had been admitted into his gilded inner circle. Those men and women who bravely posted selfies on X as they arrived in Washington in the belief they would be attending the inauguration of The Donald.

There was Liz Truss looking like a cheap Paddington Bear in a blue coat and red Maga hat announcing her arrival in DC. Only to go mysteriously silent when she discovered she hadn’t made the cut. Not just to the Rotunda where the main action was being staged but also not to the overspill area in the Capitol where guests could follow proceedings on TV. Presumably Lizzie was left to watch the action on her phone in a McDonald’s somewhere downtown.

Then there was Suella Braverman. She was filmed arriving at the airport and was never seen again. Perhaps she had enough self-worth to fly straight home once she realised she was not wanted. Unlikely though. Also on the flight was Laurence Fox, who has abandoned acting for a career as a full-time halfwit. He filmed himself watching the inauguration on TV with the fantasist cleric Calvin Robinson in a hotel room. The sheer sense of pointlessness was tragic.

We must also not forget Nigel Farage. The man who never stops telling GB News he is the only person in the UK with Trump’s ear. I guess The Donald must have gone deaf. It will take Nige a while to recover from that humiliation.

It must have been even more galling for him that the only Brit with a seat in the Rotunda was Boris Johnson. That was bitter-sweet for Bozza. His life is going nowhere – his book bombed – and even the Tories have given up on him. Not wanted at home, barely tolerated abroad. Finally this bunch of desperadoes have come to realise what the rest of us have always known: that Trump’s relationships are fickle and transactional. He has no need of the Brits any more. They are dead to him. He has moved on to the billionaire tech bros.

Tuesday

January is a miserable month. The holidays are over and there is next to nothing to look forward to until the clocks move on an hour at the end of March. The days are cold and it feels like everyone is in survival mode. Joy is in short supply and many people are wrestling with colds.

The only upside is the TV because the networks save many of their best shows for this time of year because they know they have a captive audience. Unlike millions, I haven’t been watching Traitors because even when it first aired I decided I couldn’t be arsed with yet another reality show. I may be missing out but the thought of yet more meaningless challenges and reveals has me yearning for oblivion. Instead, I find myself gripped by Silent Witness and must be one of those rare sentient beings that have watched every episode of all 28 series.

In the beginning it was great TV: for the last five years or so it has been the fact it is so catastrophically bad that makes it unmissable. Nikki Alexander has only two expressions – concerned and totally blank. This is one more than Jack Hodgson (I’m using their fictional names to spare their blushes). He just does completely blank. Nikki and Jack are supposed to be a couple but you wouldn’t know it from the chemistry. Nikki was also once buried alive in Mexico but appears to have shrugged it off.

Then there are the story lines. In this year’s season opener we had two men going around killing random old people in the same village for their pensions without anyone noticing that elderly people were getting thin on the ground. Who came up with that? Then this week, Nikki started doing a postmortem on one of her old chums. I guess the series has run for so long there’s a fair chance that most of the people she knows have been murdered. Long may Silent Witness prosper. I don’t know what I would do without it.

Wednesday

Back in the day, when I was writing Digested Read each week, January was always a tricky month as not much new got published other than a few first novels, which I always considered off-limits. Nothing to be gained from making fun of new authors. But I was always saved by a new self-help book – often something by Paul McKenna – as this was the time of year when people traditionally make a resolution for some kind of self-improvement.

Nothing much has changed and one of this year’s bestsellers so far is The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool that Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About by the American writer Mel Robbins, who modestly describes herself as the most sought-after expert in life improvement, mindset and behaviour change. If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed or frustrated with where you are, reads the blurb, the problem isn’t you. The problem is the power you give to other people. Mel’s solution? Let them. Stop trying to manage the things you can’t control.

Now, I may be missing something here, but this seems to be pretty much the message of the serenity prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and other self-help groups for decades. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change / The courage to change the things I can / And the wisdom to know the difference.” So rather than Mel’s book, you might actually be better off finding yourself a meeting. It will cost you nothing.

Thursday

It seems that even Kemi Badenoch has had enough of Liz Truss. After Keir Starmer had taunted the Tories at prime minister’s questions last week with Lizzie’s deranged “cease and desist” letter in which she demanded he stop saying she had crashed the economy, Kemi told her shadow cabinet that she wanted to find a way of silencing her former leader. Truss’s interventions were consistently unhelpful, she said, and detracted from the new image Badenoch was trying to create for the Tories.

This may be easier said than done. Lizzie is box office gold – particularly for sketch writers – as she can be guaranteed to say something idiotic. So journalists will continue to hound her for comment at every opportunity. She also has no self-awareness and believes that all that went wrong with her 45 days in office was that she didn’t get long enough. That people would have come to see that only she could save the west if only she had been given time to explain. Also problematic is Kemi’s own tenuous grip on reality. Just this week she released her first party political broadcast in which she admitted the Tories had left the economy and the NHS in a terrible state but forgot to add the word “sorry”. It was apparently “just one of those things”. All politicians made promises they didn’t keep so the country had to suck it up. Even more disturbingly, Kemi insisted things were now going to be different. Without acknowledging that many ministers who had been in the cabinet and been a cheerleader for Lizzie – including her – are now in the shadow cabinet. That’s not different. That’s continuity. Kemi doesn’t get to choose if the country wants to forget Truss. We do. And most of us – along with our mortgages – are in no mood to forgive just yet.

Friday

A retraction. A partial one. A month or two ago, I wrote here that I had had enough of the current Spurs team. That I was numb to their failures and no longer felt a sense of despair as they slid to yet another defeat. The team had given up and so had I. The thrill had gone. Now, I’m not so sure. Something odd has happened. The sense of excitement has returned. Just not in the way I had expected.

Don’t get me wrong. Tottenham still often look clueless. The fans like to make excuses for themselves – the injury list, the owners, we’re in a process of rebuilding – but the fact of the matter is we just aren’t that good. Almost all the players are underperforming and would struggle to get into the first team of any club in the top half of the Premier league. But what has made the season suddenly more interesting is that there is now some jeopardy. Spurs have won just five points out of the last 30 and if this goes on they could find themselves in a relegation battle. And I say, bring it on.

This is the kind of football for which I don’t resent walking up Tottenham High Road to pay a lot of money to see my team self-destruct. So much more fun than playing game after meaningless game to finish comfortably in mid-table mediocrity. I want the adrenaline back. I wouldn’t even really mind if we did get relegated. It would be the most Spursy thing ever. It would certainly be the most entertaining thing the team has done this century. A year or so in the Championship might liven things up. New away grounds to visit. Best of all would be to get relegated while winning a cup. Unlikely I know but we are still somehow in three competitions. Then I would know I had got my Tottenham back.