Venice Beach. Last autumn. Ocean breeze and legal weed in the air. A friend visiting from Britain is grousing about Nadine Dorries, one of those harmless eccentrics who roam the foothills of politics in that troubled kingdom. On and on he goes, until I ask why he is letting a backbencher-cum-reality TV also-ran spoil a Pacific day.
“Janan, she’s in the cabinet.”
Oh. With luck, we are seeing the end of first-wave populism: populism as farce. Boris Johnson and his least gifted accomplices are on the way out. Donald Trump is no longer in the White House. Jair Bolsonaro is favoured to lose re-election as president of Brazil in October. The showmen who rose to power in the second half of the last decade have not taken to the grind of high office.