Change is coming – but is it for real?

If you thought politics had reached a low point in this country, spare a thought for voters in America. In November, they’re going to have to choose either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump to lead them through one of the more turbulent and unsettling periods of modern history.

Trump’s shortcomings are well documented and relentlessly ridiculed. I still can’t decide whether he’s a real person or a brilliant invention designed specifically to wind up the moral majority on social media. Perhaps the joke went too far and they never thought he’d actually get as far as securing the Republican nomination.

Clinton herself is a divisive character, especially within her own party. In the country at large she is seen by many as being part of the ‘political establishment’. Her husband, the former President Bill Clinton, strongly denied it this week in a gushing speech (he’s got a lot to make up for) describing Hillary as “the best darn changemaker I’ve ever met”.

Maybe I’m moving in the wrong circles but I’ve never ranked my friends and family in terms of their ‘changemaker’ abilities.

As for the outgoing President, am I alone in finding Obama’s thinly-disguised ambition to move into stand-up comedy a little tiresome? He even managed a jokey aside while expressing his outrage at the Munich shootings. Any longer in the job and he’d be abusing his position to be the first person to tell the sick jokes that inevitably follow any major tragedy.