Melania Trump’s superpower that will finally make America rediscover its greatness

Thank goodness that at last there’s a Trump back in the White House. , that is. Whatever you think of her husband and his politics, on the night of the inauguration, we got a blast of glamour of the type the world’s been yearning for. The last few years have been grim: so can Melania make America great again? You may think I am being shallow, but these things matter. The woman to whom Melania is often compared, set the tone of the administration almost as much as did her husband. With her style and his steel, they gave America back its future.

Jackie championed and became such a global icon (as they wouldn’t have put it back then) in her own right that when they travelled abroad, JFK was able to joke, with very good grace, that it was Jackie the crowds came to see, not him. It was also Jackie who created the myth of Camelot about his presidency by claiming they liked to listen to it in the evenings: those who knew the Prez say that in reality, the last thing he would have spent his nights doing would be listening to Broadway musicals.

However. post his assassination it was an image that cheered the United States up at a time of terrible national trauma.

Look closer to home and you can see why these things matter. About the only sighting we’ve had of Lady Starmer in months was when it emerged that she, like half the Cabinet, had been happy to accept free clothes from a Labour donor.

It’s been left to the charmless duo of from Accounts and to provide the glamour quotient, some-thing that they are almost as unqualified to do as act as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Deputy Prime Minister… Heaven help us all.

What we need in the UK above all else is a little optimism and there is no better way of providing this than through style, elegance and the knowledge that those at the heart of power know where to shop.

Carrie Johnson, Samantha Cameron, Cherie Blair, Michelle Obama, Jill Biden: they all made a mark on our consciousness, whether for good or for ill. Melania’s already done it once and she’s quite clearly setting out to do it again and I, for one, am looking forward to it, whatever the Trump presidency brings.

Hold on to your Chanel hats. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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There are new proposals that bottles of should carry health warnings: do we really need yet another joyless injunction to ruin every last moment of happiness we have? I am entirely with Kingsley Amis on this one. No pleasure is worth forgoing just to spend a couple of extra years in a nursing home.

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Diaries have been discovered written by the ghastly talking of her great passion for Adolf Hitler. In one entry she describes him as “very sweet and gay.” Hmm. Half of that description might have been closer to the truth than she thought.

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gets an awful lot of stick on an awful lot of fronts, but he came up, ahem, trumps, in his choice of music: YMCA played at the pre-inauguration rally and topped that off by . Pure class.

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The decision to allow to claim compensation from the time of The Troubles has the hallmark of ’s incompetence all over it.

First it displayed completely cloth-eared political judgment in even thinking that would go down well with the public.

And second, having realised his mistake, he’s now blaming it all on someone else, namely Hilary Benn. And we’ve got another four-and-a- half-years of this. Great.

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Ladies, some advice. Never, ever trust a man who says he’s a feminist.

The author Neil Gaiman is just the latest in a series of so-called male champions for women who have been accused of repeated sexual assaults: he denies it but there’s no shortage of women queuing up to make claims about his behaviour, which are, to put it mildly, disturbing.

Men who engage in such behaviour are sleaze-bag wolves dressed as sheep.

You’ve been warned.

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And so farewell then, What a sad end to an astonishing beginning.

I was at Cambridge in the 1980s, a couple of years after the gang that included Emma Thompson, Steven Fry, Hugh Laurie and of course Tony.

Like everyone else back then I had never heard of the first three, but I certainly knew who Tony Slattery was.

They were still talking about him at the university several years after he left and I once even saw the great man, sitting on the steps of some Cambridge institution, surrounded by awestruck admirers.

Great things were expected of him and for a while they happened. Rest in peace, Tony. You will be missed.

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Another triumph for – she’s been denied a main speaking slot at this week’s in Davos. What a shock. Socialism has never ever worked anywhere, ever. Why would anyone even slightly sentient think it will now?

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It has been reported that almost two-thirds of rapes in Sweden have been carried out by migrants. That’s what comes of allowing arrant stupidity to fly in the face of common sense.

Introduce a large number of people from a totally different culture into a stable European country and is anyone even slightly surprised when tragedy occurs?

It’s the exact same reason the rape gangs (let’s stop calling them “grooming”) ran out of control here. In fact, that same statistic may well be true for the UK too. Not that the authorities, consumed with covering up these terrible crimes, are likely to allow us to know.