Kelly’s Eye

DONALD Trump’s misfortune is to come across as a strutting buffoon.As a consequence, most of us – not unreasonably – conclude that he is at heart, well, a strutting buffoon. But while he provides an easy satirical target for people like me, he also provokes some even funnier double standards.

Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien last week declared that the president should win the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to broker the historic diplomatic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

It hasn’t a prayer of happening. But can you remember what Barack Obama received the same prize for, before he’d completed a year in theWhite House?

The citation was some boilerplate waffle about strengthening “co-operation between people”, especially relations with the Muslim world, which might have come as news to the thousands there killed in US drone strikes during his presidency. If the

Israel-UAE deal had happened on Obama’s watch, it would have been greeted with swooning admiration, not least on TV news.

The latter long ago abandoned any pretence of maintaining its greatest strength of impartiality, its newsreaders preferring to leave us in no doubt of their views on Trump and much else, either by outright lecturing (think Emily Maitlis on Newsnight) or the world-weary eye-rolling and sighing perfected by Tom Bradby on ITV’s News at Ten.

Similarly, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern this week postponed the country’s general election by a month because there’s been a few new coronavirus cases there. Ardern ranks alongside the child messiah Greta Thunberg as the progressives’ poster girl, so there was little or no adverse coverage of her decision.Yet when Trump made an equally overreacting suggestion about delaying the forthcoming presidential contest, it was greeted as if he’d attempted a fascist coup d’état.