Donald Trump claimed on Twitter that he had written his inaugural address himself. “Less of an agenda, more a philosophical document,” was how one aide described it. Chances are it will be one long score-settling rant. If so, it will be in a good tradition. Ulysses S Grant ended his with a bitter whinge in 1873: “I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equalled in political history.” Trump would add: “#FakeNews. Sad!” Or perhaps he will try to beat John Adams, whose speech in 1797 had one sentence that featured 727 words and 17 semi-colons. Bill Clinton reportedly stayed up to 4.30am on inauguration day tweaking his words. Hillary told the press that her husband had “never met a sentence he couldn’t fool with”. Nor, it turned out, an intern.
Novak Djokovic, the main threat to Andy Murray in the Australian Open tennis championship, was knocked out in the second round yesterday by the world No 117, one Denis Istomin. It sounds like he had an allergic reaction to his opponent. Djokovic should have taken an anti-Istomin.
COINING IT IN
Gary Bell, QC, tells a magnificent story in The Spectator about Britain’s worst counterfeiter, who used a smelting kit and rubber mould to make pound coins, one at a time, which he carefully painted once they had cooled. Each took him an hour to make and the judge, perplexed, asked why he bothered. “You’re earning a sixth of the minimum wage,” he said. “Why not get a job?” The counterfeiter replied that he preferred working for himself. He was given a conditional discharge. Bell writes that if the man had zipped home and worked until 6pm he would just about have made enough to cover his morning’s car parking.
LORD OF THE TRANCE
After a long hunt, Trump has found one big name to perform at his inauguration. Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance troupe will be doing a jig at the ceremony. Flatley, who grew up in Chicago, is likely to play more of an introductory role, having badly damaged his body by dancing. At one stage he was taking so much medication that at a show in Tasmania he mistakenly called out to the audience: “We love you, Temazepam.” Some Americans may consider that the best way to get through the next four years.
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I wrote this week about a cremation service where the organist was asked to play Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. John Williams emailed to tell me of another funeral, this time of a butcher, at which the organist played Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze.
FRANCE GIVES BORIS A MISS
The French seem much less bothered by Boris Johnson’s Great Escape gaffe than people in this country. TMS’s man in the Breton jersey tells me that it made none of the top news bulletins and was barely in the press. Still, Sir Simon Jenkins went on Radio 4 to call it an appalling lapse of judgment. “I screamed,” the hand-wringing Guardian columnist said. Jenkins then twice said that it was fine to draw parallels between Brexit and the Hundred Years War. France won that one, of course, which makes it more palatable to The Guardian.
