Grumpy Oldie Man

My son has the answer – move Californians to Florida

If that terracotta kraken wins or, more likely, steals it, thanks to the indulgence of the Supreme Court, I asked my son Louis as we drove through a biblical rainstorm on the M3, what the hell are we going to do?

A long, anguished pause ensued. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally murmured, projecting a kind of cosmic Weltschmerz that struck me as impressively precocious for one of 23. ‘Another four years of this … I simply do not know.’

The two of us had shared enough unutterably dismal nights in front of the telly to have kidded ourselves that we’d become hardened to the horror.

First came the 2015 general election. Having turned 18 a few days earlier, he just made the cut.

After I’d tearily watched him cast his first vote, for Labour, we went to the pub. I reassured him that the dead heat predicted by all the pools would at least prevent a solo Tory government, and might lead to Ed Miliband’s cobbling together one of his own. That touching fantasy was slain a few seconds after 10pm by the exit poll.

The next year ratcheted up the horror twice – first with Brexit in June, and then in November, with the selection to lead the free world of President Doolally J Bonespurs.

We watched the cataclysm unfold through whisky-bleared eyes in my son’s Edinburgh student flat. At 5am, he summoned the courage to wake his flatmate, a lovely young woman from New Jersey, with the result.

Without uttering a word, she spoke eloquently for the planet as she stumbled into the sitting room, pressed her face against the condensation-sodden window and silently sobbed for two hours as she gazed unseeingly out over the Meadows.

And now here we are, almost four years on, having added Boris Johnson’s landslide to the honours board, on the cusp of the mescaline-fuelled nightmare to end them all.

Inured to the misery, it transpires, we most certainly aren’t. ‘I simply…’ he reiterated, before yielding the power of speech.

This sub-sub-sub-sub-pinterian exchange came hours after the latest politically themed all-nighter, shared with his mother and four dogs in Dorset. This one involved the eruption of infantile spite, formally styled ‘the first Presidential debate’.

If words occasionally failed Joe Biden, bless his doughty old heart, there he aped Louis’s American flatmate by speaking tacitly for us all.

There are no words left for the tangerine grifter. The lexicon of revulsion was thoroughly exhausted long before he made his barely coded appeal to his white-supremacist fan club, to use semi-automatics to intimidate black people into not casting their votes.

And yet still he has a genuine chance. Now I understand how hard this must be for you to imagine.

For loyal subjects of Her Britannic Maj, it is inconceivable that power could be entrusted to a gibberish-spouting sexual incontinent with legendarily demented fair hair who has visibly proven his eagerness to set his country ablaze to sate his narcissist-toddler craving for attention.

Yet imagine it we morosely must. At the time of writing, the betting markets make the abomination a six-to-four shot to return to the Oval Office. And although

Nate Silver, the genius statistician behind the electoral analysis website 538.com, calculates his chances at a more reassuring one in five, even that represents a grievous threat.

‘The thing is,’ said my son as we aquaplaned along the M25, ‘even if Biden wins well, and even if Trump concedes without going for the military coup, more than 40 per cent of Americans will have voted for him. This problem isn’t about to vanish, is it?’

Of course it isn’t. There’ll be another demi-fascist, Russian asset along next time or the one after, with or without any juicy kompromat in the Kremlin safe, looking to profit from the inbuilt Republican advantage in the electoral college.

‘What we need to do,’ said Louis thoughtfully, ‘and I hope this doesn’t seem wildly outlandish, is to move a couple of million Democrat voters out of California, and strategically relocate them in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other swing states.’

I said that such a modest level of gerrymandering seemed entirely feasible to me, and enquired after the funding.

‘Well, if we gave each of them a $500,000 resettlement grant, it would cost only a trillion dollars. Jeff Bezos could foot the bill himself. Do you have a number for Jeff Bezos?’

‘I have a number for Amazon customer services,’ I said. ‘Might the call centre put me through?’

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘even if it did, and Bezos agreed to foot the bill, it’d probably be too late for 3rd November. So what the hell will we do if Trump wins?’

A weedy shaft of sunlight unexpectedly pierced the dirt-grey raincloud as we hit Chiswick. I glanced up in search of a rainbow. Predictably enough, there was none.

‘I don’t know what we’ll do,’ I muttered. ‘I simply do not know.’

‘A modest level of gerrymandering seemed entirely feasible to me’