Politicians looking good – compared to Donald

IF you’d been told in 2010, when Angela Merkel began openly telling Ireland what to do, that you’d end up feeling a strange, fond kinship with the Chancellor of Germany, you’d have been shocked. ‘Gott im Himmel,’ you might have shouted. But in the days we live in now, post-Trump, it’s all ‘Darth Vader seeming like a decent enough fellah’ and ‘Aw, there’s George W Bush, bless him’, and so on. Similarly, on seeing the tape of Trump apparently refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand on Friday at the White House, and of her signally failing to appreciate his joke about wire-tapping, everyone went: ‘Angela, me old chum, come here till I pinch your cheeks. You’re one of us.’ Politicians who seem even halfway sane, no matter what they stand for, are accepted. This is how bad it’s got.