John Dickie column: 'At best President Trump is a petulant infant, but at worst he is a petulant infant with his finger on the nuclear trigger

It’s hard to keep up with events these days. The last few weeks have barely impinged on me; apart from the fact that a dear friend is on a ventilator in NGH, not a lot has really changed.

My newspapers are delivered, Sainsbury’s brings an avalanche of orange bags to the doorstep, the Good Loaf appear with sourdough bread and brownies, wine appears by magic and even a selection of geranium plants arrived, including one called ‘Elke’.

The delivery people are magical and considerate; it’s really just like being retired. The only downside is I miss my weekly coffee with old friends in Manuals coffee house. My exercise routine is somewhat limited, a few circuits of Chalk Lane car park. I now understand what Oscar Wilde was talking about in the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, his description of the prisoners walking round the walled-in exercise yard observing ‘the tent of blue that some men call the sky’.

However, I cannot help but observe the omnishambles that passes for government policy, indeed there has been no policy. From day one it would appear that if there was a right and a wrong way to do something, well we all know what way things would go. The failure to do serious planning that was warned about by experts months before. The panic when it was realised there were not enough ventilators or protective clothing. The titanic error in forgetting care homes. The colossal failure to stop travellers entering the country. Every week targets were set and then missed or amended.

Absolute cast-iron rules about movement were introduced, then it appears the PM’s closest advisor felt he needed to drive from London to Durham with his wife and child because she had the virus. Some of this saga couldn’t be a Two Ronnies’ sketch, just as the failure to recognise to apply the distancing rule in school would require much larger schools (or very much smaller children). Of course, the failure of that policy needed someone to blame... step forward teaching unions !

The leitmotif of this government over the last few months has been two-fold: find someone else to blame and, secondly, make bombastic, Churchillian speeches from a podium at a daily press conference. There was a time when if governments made such a horlicks of a situation ministers would take responsibility and resign. So far, a junior bloke in the Scottish Office has walked. That says it all.

But then Johnson is only the monkey not the organ grinder. Many serious commentators believe Trump may have a mental health problem, that at best he is a petulant infant, but at worst he is a petulant infant with his finger on the nuclear trigger. His irrational behaviour is typified by his hysterical tweets which blame everyone but himself. A man who believes you can cure the Covid virus by drinking bleach.

But he is the Commander-in Chief and many of my American friends believe he will, when he loses in November, declare there is a state of ‘insurrection’ and will assume powers. I think that risk is receding, he would rely heavily on the military and over the last few days the military leaders have indicated they would not support a Trump coup and would recognise Biden as the CinC.

However, that’s not to dismiss the notion that the megalomaniac might just declare war on China. His bedrock support is still the racist underclass... and they have guns.

Now I don’t think his British understrapper is as crazy as Trump, but the rhetoric has similarities. Whenever something goes wrong, ‘blame the outside agitators’.

That has been his line over the BLM movement.

It may seem like things are going downhill fast, but I’m strangely optimistic; the spontaneous demonstrations all over the country were largely young people with hand-made signs written on bits of cardboard.

Largely without central direction, the BLM movement understood that confrontation with neo-Nazi thugs was counterproductive and they left them to confront the police and urinate on memorials to police officers murdered.

I remember being young in the ‘60s: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, And your old ways are rapidly changing”.

The world has, at last, caught up with Bob Dylan.