If America can’t stop HATING HILLARY we are ALL in peril

A blistering interjection from our former ambassador to Washington

IN JUST over two weeks’ time, to the blessed relief of many, the US presidential election will come to its tawdry climax. Voters will go to the polls on Tuesday, November 8, so bringing down the curtain on one of the dirtiest and meanest contests in the history of Western democratic politics.

‘It ain’t over till it’s over,’ said the famous quipster and baseball star Yogi Berra. But it very much looks as though Hillary Rodham Clinton will become America’s first woman president, as Donald Trump disappears into the vortex of his grossness, narcissism and dishonesty, all on vivid display in the third and final presidential debate last week.

For all its repugnant features, this has been an election of endless fascination for students of US politics. The inquests have already begun. How could an ignorant political maverick and dodgy businessman like Trump have captured the Republican Party – the ‘Grand Old Party’ and heirs to Abraham Lincoln? How, to this day, despite all the gaffes and sexual scandals, can Trump still retain the loyalty of 40 per cent of likely voters? What is the deep pool of discontent in which he has been fishing, pretty successfully, for votes?

All these questions revolve around the flamboyant, thin-skinned and corpulent figure of Trump. But there is something else. If the polls are to be believed, there have never been two more unpopular candidates in the history of presidential elections.

That is understandable where Trump is concerned, since the politics of division are at the heart of his strategy, such as it is. But Hillary, too, is massively unpopular. For many on this side of the Atlantic it is hard to understand why she is so disliked, and why she made such heavy weather of defeating her rival at the primary stage, an obscure senator called Bernie Sanders, and why she is not 100 per cent certain of beating Trump.

AFTER all, Hillary Clinton has a pretty distinguished record. Aside from eight years as First Lady to President Bill Clinton, she was a senator from New York for eight years and President Obama’s secretary of state for four. Add in her time – nine years – as wife to Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas and she is beyond question one of the most experienced politicians in the United States.

I should declare an interest. My wife and I knew her pretty well when I was ambassador to the US in Bill Clinton’s second term. We found her the opposite of her public image. In private she was amusing and vivacious with a raucous laugh. She had her serious side and her speeches tended to be flat and robotic, but I remember collecting the late Mo Mowlam, the Northern Ireland Secretary, who was having a private dinner with Hillary and friends at the White House. I heard peals of laughter coming from inside the dining room. A serious discussion of policy this was not.

We never met Trump. But we had a narrow escape. We once attended a charity dinner in Florida, where he was one of the sponsors. A number of other ambassadors were also there. At Trump’s invitation, they had hitched a ride from Washington on his private jet. We, thank goodness, were travelling under our own steam.

On the journey back, Trump suddenly changed course and flew to a tiny airport in New Jersey, where the ambassadors were unceremoniously dumped. That tells you a lot about Trump the man and Trump the politician, none of it complimentary.

The downside of having decades of experience in frontline politics is that you accumulate a lot of mud and a lot of enemies. Trump accuses Clinton of having had ‘bad’ experience. Throughout her career, starting with her Arkansas days, there have been episodes that have emitted the whiff of scandal or impropriety, though nothing has ever been proved. Opaque land deals, something not quite right with travel expenses in the White House and, more recently, the interminable saga of whether, when she was Secretary of State, she had broken the law by using a private email server for classified government communications. Her response was not a model of transparency, to put it charitably (but the FBI said earlier this year it would not press charges).

So, you would expect Republican voters to mistrust her intensely. But with many, especially Trump supporters, it is a matter of deep, unshakeable hatred, as much emotional as rational. They believe the email scandal sealed Hillary’s reputation as a serial liar. They think Hillary and Bill are deeply corrupt, using the Clinton Foundation to extract millions of dollars from dubious donors around the world.

They see her replacing Bill at the heart of a Washington establishment for which they have profound contempt. ‘Crooked Hillary’, as Trump calls her, represents, to many people, everything they dislike about politicians, above all their hypocrisy.

Recent revelations that she has earned enormous fees for addressing private gatherings of Wall Street institutions such as Goldman Sachs, while preaching against income inequality on the campaign trail, have reinforced the visceral loathing she arouses. One of the reasons Sanders did so well against her was that a lot of this vituperation bled into her own party, where some of her severest critics are perversely found. Some of this goes back to her husband’s years as President, when his affairs with Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers and others came to light – what Hillary called his ‘bimbo eruptions’. Her determination to stand by her man infuriated the more ardent feminists who would normally be part of her core constituents.

THEN there are the Democrats who believe she and Bill moved too far to the Right by the end of his Presidency. They condemn her also for having voted for the war in Iraq. Today a new generation, who know little of what Bill and Hillary did for the rights of women and African-Americans, have joined the ranks of these older, disillusioned Democrats, lured by the radically Left-wing message of Sanders.

This is the most important American election in my lifetime. We live in the Age of Unravelling as our international system, set up after the Second World War, starts to fall apart. Failed states proliferate in the Middle East and Africa. Putin tears up agreements made with the West at the end of the Cold War. Tectonic plates shift beneath the EU. The turmoil is beyond the power of international institutions and agreements to contain.

As Boris Johnson said at the Conservative Party conference, a new ideological struggle is under way, in which the very survival of Western liberal democracy is at stake.

There has rarely been greater need for firm, wise and calm leadership in the US, still the world’s greatest power. Hillary Clinton can give this leadership. Trump cannot. The future of the world depends on it.

There’s never been a greater need for a wise, calm leader