Shooting from the lip

their marketability”.

Then came a presidential candidate named McCain, who claimed: “I run for president not to Be Somebody, but to Do Something.”

His goal: “To inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest.”

Was this just more “carefully scripted bull **** ”?

No. McCain offered “something riveting and unSpinnable and true: the fiveplus years in a North Vietnamese prison, mostly in solitary, in a box, getting tortured and starved. And the unbelievable honour and balls he showed there”.

In 1967 McCain was flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down.

“McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken to the infamous Hoa Lo prison – a.k.a. the “Hanoi Hilton”… He was delirious with pain for weeks… the other POWs were sure he would die…”

After a few months like that, the prison commandant suddenly offered to let him go.

They’d found out McCain’s father and grandfather were both US Navy admirals, and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing the son.

But McCain, just 45kg and barely able to stand, refused to leave. Not without his fellow-POWs. And so he spent four more years in Hoa Lo – “in a dark box, alone… rather than violate a Code”.

Irrefutable proof McCain was capable of devotion to something more than self-interest.

In his last speech to fellow US senators, 46 years later, McCain showed his killer strength was not only holding political opponents to account. But his own people too, including President Trump.

“Whether or not we are from the same party, we are not the President’s subordinates. We are his equal” – he demanded.

Across the world’s political theatres of war and peace, are plenty of pretenders.

Political polygraphs should be ready and charged.