Influencers slouch around their kitchens pouting, strut across the road dragging small dogs or squint through small black sunglasses in their living rooms; whatever they do, they do it in medium-wash denim and try their best to look as though they’re about to leave the house for a high-powered job (j-o-b… look that word up).

The men aren’t behaving much better. Bands of bros have begun to clog up East Village bars in backwards JFK Jr Kangol caps, or skate through Midtown in suit and trench coat; some have even submitted to being “styled” by their turtlenecked girlfriends. While in 1988 People magazine was calling John John “the sexiest man alive”, today Gen Z are making edits captioned “he’s my fashion killa”, under which other Zoomers purr: “he’s so Lana Del Rey actually”. There’s even a JFK Jr lookalike contest in Washington Square Park on Sunday (Iran, if you need a target…); America’s prince, as he was known in his Nineties heyday, has been discovered by a new generation of admirers.

The Bessette/Kennedy look is Zoomer crack, but so is the lore. Son of a slain president meets a pretty Manhattan party girl — a publicist at Obsession-era Calvin Klein, no less. They meet (while he’s dating Daryl Hannah), they marry and then they die, along with Bessette’s sister, in spectacular fashion in 1999. For Americans who secretly crave royal intrigue, they always embodied something approaching their own House of Windsor. And today, as grand American dynasties make way for populist parvenus like the Trumps, the Kennedy Curse, still at work, condemns this white-bread couple to a fashion girly’s Pinterest boards, there to cycle and shout and snog forevermore. For a brief shining moment, the Kennedy clan embodied muscular, forward-leaning confidence; today the torch is carried by a worm-brained health secretary and a deeply unserious Millennial congressional candidate. It feels good to remember them in their prime.

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Why MAGA is losing the MAHA Moms

By Poppy Sowerby

Like Lady Di, fortunately, JFK Jr and Bessette are petrified in photogenic youth; the writers of Love Story made it clear that the parallels are baked in, directly inspired by royal blockbuster The Crown (the screenwriter Connor Hines said he’d been inspired to cover Kennedy and Bessette after watching the Netflix series). Resembling Diana too is the fey Bessette, who declined to give interviews and so was in her time known as wounded, inscrutable, the woman with “the downcast eyes”. And just like the British royals, the pair represent the faded glamor of a lost world.

For the many Zoomer fans of the series, of course, the lost world is not Camelot but a decade which even those of us who scraped 20th-century birthdays certainly cannot remember. Nineties New York is a foreign country for transplants like me, a dreamland of square jaws, land-lines and the print press. My suspicion is that the tragic hero and heroine of this tale were really quite ordinary; his pedigree and her muteness propelled a myth which would have wilted in the social-media age. His image was carefully manicured — after all he was plotting a stab at his birthright, politics — and hers was in the hands of icy Post columnists who resented her discretion.

Yet Carolyn and John’s new fans are rather the opposite. Absent their own mythos, motivation or mystique, they ape that of others. Fashion cycles may span 30 years, but the Nineties hold a particular weight in the Gen-Z imagination precisely because it was the final decade before the encroachment of the internet into the everyday. It is worth pointing out that the fantasy of the couple’s chicly opaque private lives is betrayed by the series itself: much of it seems to have been based on books written by close friends of the couple looking to make a buck in the 2000s; read a little around the subject of JFK Jr’s “charisma” and you’ll realize how many New York/Washington scenesters seem to have made a career of repeating five-minute anecdotes from 30 years ago. Sycophants circle even today, their reverence jarring in the age of nepo-baby hatred: “If there was anybody destined to be president, it was him,” a political scientist told the Guardian about spotting JFK Jr during a White House dinner. Years before social media, this couple were guinea pigs for hysterical overexposure.

For a new generation of vibe curators drooling over the couple’s battered Birkin 40s and fat striped ties, the broader resonance of what Bessette and Kennedy represented is lost — not just #couplegoals but the last gasp of American aristocracy, the great dynasties which once enjoyed such ease and prestige. These clans are now most loudly championed by Temu torchbearers like Jack Schlossberg, JFK Jr’s doltish 33-year-old nephew whose own Kennedy Curse seems to be an ambition for congressional office coupled with Brooklyn Beckham levels of attention-gobbling anti-gravitas. A social-media saddo just like his fans, Schlossberg managed to snatch a couple of headlines by lashing out at the series’ portrayal of his uncle by saying, so eloquently, that the show’s creator Murphy “looks like a thumb” and is a “bloated” “pervert”. Get that man on Capitol Hill! Were John John given Instagram and a front-facing camera, would he too have been unmasked as a shallow try-hard? One wonders whether the public’s love affair with Camelot was really a story of scarcity, of dignified distance.

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Why the Nineties rocked

By Douglas Coupland

Hamming up this Kennedy mystique, Murphy — he of the scandalously glossy biopics of monsters like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein and the Menendez brothers — casts JFK Jr as an Edward Cullen prototype, a boring, brooding hunk helped along by fanfic dialog. In Murphy’s hands Bessette, rehabilitated by the 2024 biography on which the series is based, is a spiky, witty city girl. What results is a kind of aristocracy drag, something for the “quiet luxury” TikTokers to get their chops around. Bessette’s style — pared-back professional minimalism — has always been her most memorable feature (perhaps because she was otherwise silent, or more likely dull); after a promotional image of the Love Story set was mocked by fashion types, Murphy brought in the costume designer Rudy Mance, who dutifully obsessed over the type of top-stitching on a Prada bag because, as Variety put it, “someone would have noticed”. Because the targeted viewer is from a generation which sees curation as a shortcut to authenticity, I have no doubt this is true — but you have to ask exactly who gives a fuck, particularly when other details seem to go so awry. It’s worth reading the invective of one former JFK Jr employee who laments that her George magazine boss is portrayed as a “pussy” with a “lisp”, “lip-quivering” and “whining” his way through the relationship like a “big baby”. Nineties aesthetics overlaid with 2020s masculinity make for a strange brew: it’s possible that Zoomer viewers would be repulsed by this family’s firm commitment to pluralism when it came to women — in which John was no exception — and so shrewd showrunners turned him into a palatably lovelorn pussio.

The show luxuriates in long-gone sexual archetypes: the muscular Brown grad chucking footballs around Central Park and the waifish blonde wilting over desks at her glossy fashion job. You’d be shocked at how Zoomettes are shrieking over John John’s chest hair; even the hair on his head, as one wistful TikTok commenter put it, is “so rare nowadays” (ubi sunt, hairlines?). Murphy asks us to imagine that 30 years ago we, too, might have been the hottest couple in the world. In reality, boyfriends have always balded, jobs have always dragged and living in the city has always meant dodging dead rats — but young women’s yearning scrubs all that from their daydream of an always-better, cooler and more authentic New York where they definitely would have swished about galas in slip dresses. It’s telling that Zoomer women are so sold on the show’s vision of Carolyn’s lifestyle: a suitor sending you roses via your secretary and leaving you gravelly voicemails is far more desirable than dodging foot-fetishists on Hinge. Murphy knows this, and so gives us full fantasy.

Daydream all you like, but please don’t bring your impersonations to the dive bar. Pity the backwards-capped imitators who will try out the Kennedy cadence on girls at The Spaniard. Nothing about John and Carolyn’s relationship is desirable: it was often grim, toxic and unfaithful — but this pair looked good together, and that alone is enough to send Gen Z rushing to a West Village pharmacy to buy tortoiseshell headbands just like poor old CBK.

Perhaps that’s the great tragedy of this pretty pairing’s demise: though they should have split up, grown haggard and morphed into the patrician Boomers they were destined to become, they were condemned to pop mythology. America no longer produces princes, so it must relentlessly reanimate them; if the greatest Kennedys had the rich ideals of Camelot, Gen Z has only the flimsy aesthetic refuge of a well-dressed couple necking around Manhattan. Before production, Murphy said the series should be a “showcase for Nineties minimalism”; what he created is really a shrine to Twenties triviality.

The phrase “conspiracy theory” was once synonymous with delusional, rationally absurd notions. And yet our executive, intelligence community, and Justice Department have undeniably conspired against Donald Trump and other perceived threats to the state. At the same time, Israel’s Mossad has executed unprecedented operations against its enemies, some of which would be literally unbelievable — exploding pagers? Really? — had they not actually happened. Is it conspiratorial to note that these are beloved tropes of spy fiction?

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Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?

By David Mamet

Where might Islamic Jihadists have discovered the idea of flying aircraft into iconic structures? In Tom Clancy’s techno-thriller Debt of Honor (1994), a Japanese terrorist flies a 747 into the Capitol, and in Thomas Harris’s Black Sunday (1975), Islamic terrorists rig the Goodyear blimp as a bomb and fly it into the Super Bowl.

Many writers were literally secret agents. Frederick Forsyth, the creator of the techno-thriller, was a spy for the British secret service while working as a journalist. So, too, were Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. Ian Fleming worked in wartime London as a strategist for Churchill’s saboteurs, the Special Operations Executive. His Bond books, though enjoyable, are neither technically interesting nor especially informative. In Casino Royale, for example, Bond carries a .25 caliber Beretta, a purse pistol, which any shooter will tell you is a “good thing to have if you don’t have a gun”. In his next outing, 007 has upgraded to a .32 caliber Walther, which is not much better.

When enlisted in the War Effort, Fleming’s imagination conjured a plan to capture a German seaplane, fill it with British commandos, then stage an engine-out landing near some Nazi ship or base that needed destruction. It was never implemented.

One of the grandest wartime schemes did become a book: The Man Who Never Was. It concerns Operation Mincemeat, which was a plot whereby a British vagrant, who had died from ingesting rat poison, was dressed and accoutred as an officer in the Royal Marines. His body was carried by submarine to the coast of Spain where it was ejected and swiftly washed ashore. The briefcase handcuffed to his arm carried correspondence indicating that the upcoming British invasion would target Sardinia. The Nazis fell for the ruse, diverting forces from Sicily — the actual Allied objective. One of the authors of the original Operation Mincemeat memo was Commander Ian Fleming, so that’s a horse on me.

Operation Mincemeat was also memorialized in a rather good 1956 film starring Clifton Webb. A lesser-known version is Duff Cooper’s 1950 novel Operation Heartbreak. Not only a novelist, Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890-1954) was also a prominent Tory politician, First Lord of the admiralty, and, after the war, ambassador to France. During the First World War he served in the trenches as a Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. During Churchill’s time in the “Wilderness”, and, in his Prime Ministry, Duff was his closest ally. In his retelling of Mincemeat, he has a British colonel, who just missed combat in the Great War, trapped on desk duty in the Second. After he dies of a heart attack, it is his body used in the ruse.

At least we know Mincemeat definitely happened. We have no such assurances for its prequel, a story that blurs the lines between fact and fiction even if it never ended up on bookshelves.

Richard Meinertzhagen was chief of British military intelligence in East Africa at the outset of the First World War. Transferred to Egypt, he operated in Palestine against the Turks. He’s most famous for the so-called Haversack Ruse, the older brother of Mincemeat. On reconnaissance, Meinertzhagen contrived to get too close to the Ottoman lines — which promptly tried to shoot him. Despite nearly falling off his horse, Meinertzhagen managed to gallop back to safety, though not before dropping a haversack full of (false) information about General Allenby’s plans for the recapture of Jerusalem. It’s a cracking tale, and as its appearance in Mincemeat suggests, a tactic probably as old as warfare. And perhaps it’s even true.

Why should I doubt it? Well, off the field, Meinertzhagen was a colossal fraud. Acclaimed as one of Britain’s premier ornithologists, he sent back undiscovered specimens from his posts around the world. Their pride of place in museums was marred only by the discovery that they were, universally, cut-and-paste assemblages of unrelated birds. Such is the fondness for Meinertzhagen in the Spy Thriller community that a homage was paid him in one of the Smiley books. Smiley has assembled and dispersed his beloved “watchers” to surveil an opponent. He names them, and among them are “the two Meinertzhagen girls”.

As a fellow fraud, John le Carré must have loved the rotter. He was one of the great writers of the 20th century and along with Patrick O’Brien, and our George V. Higgins, he elevated the genre novel to something superior — to the status of “art”. His books, like Joseph Conrad’s spy classics, are suffused with pathos and sadness. He was one of the century’s most successful writers, both artistically and financially.

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The breakdown of the CIA

By Edward Luttwak

Who, then, would indict him as a fraud? Le Carré himself, self-confessed as a hypocrite — not as a writer, but as a spy. All his books concern the fight of the secret service against the Communist threat, even as its agents battle Whitehall corruption and treason. All his work is about disillusionment, none more so than A Perfect Spy (1986), whose hero, like le Carré himself, was raised by a confidence-man father. The protagonist, unlike le Carré, becomes a double-agent, so enamoured of acceptance that he serves two warring powers simultaneously. Upon being discovered, he goes mad and takes his own life.

A fictional soldier of fortune for America was Joe Gall. He featured in 20 thrillers by Philip Atlee. These were yarns featuring sadism and pornography — unsurprisingly attractive to me as an adolescent boy. In each of the books he (like James Bond) falls in love with a new woman who is murdered by the book’s end.

The mythic Gall was a contract agent for a government outfit so secret it even lacked a name. He was notable for his various martial skills, and for an absolute immorality in the service of his country. But more to the point is the author’s pedigree. Philip Atlee was James Atlee Phillips, brother of David Atlee Phillips, who, it seems, was the CIA handler of Lee Harvey Oswald. Now that we are able to peruse the JFK assassination files in which he features, we can not only enjoy the light they shed on conspiracy, but also look forward to the subsequent conclusion that the files themselves have been faked.

Having asserted a claim to literacy, I will now tell you what I’ve been reading, and why. I read for pleasure, and find as much pleasing in browsing as I find drudgery in study. But I am preparing a film about the assassination of John F. Kennedy — and so, I have returned to books I originally cherished just because.

Here is Jack Ruby’s Girls, a 1970 fiction supposedly written by two of his strippers as a factual account. But, under their imprimatur, his girls are not B-girls and whores, but funny, quirky dancers; and Jack is not a thug, but a warm-hearted, civic-minded old bear. All criminal memoirs are selective at best; this one’s a mere cartoon, interesting for what it suppresses. What might that be?

Another recurrence on my bedside table is The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), a compilation of essays by photographers, photo-analysts, and ballisticians, each establishing the falsity of the sole remaining film of JFK’s assassination. What’s wrong with the film? To begin, several frames are missing. No one has ever suggested a logical reason for their excision other than suppression of evidence. The blood-spatter explosion of the President’s head is, goes the claim, clearly painted on. It exists only for one frame, 0.04 of a second. In frame 312 it is absent, in the following frame it’s there, and in the next frame it’s gone — not dispersed or dispersing, but gone.

The alteration of the film in two instances proves its worthlessness as a document of anything other than deceit. For the film did not alter itself, and the various cameras confiscated in Dealey Plaza did not dispose of themselves. What did happen? Well, JFK was sharing a girlfriend with Sam Giancana of the Chicago Mob; Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald knew each other well; Oswald’s mother had been the girlfriend of Carlos Marcello, head of the New Orleans Mafia, and so on. But the Warren Commission into the assassinating concluded that Caesar was not Ambitious, and Brutus is an Honourable Man.

We may handily overlay the popular notion of mafia organisational structure onto that of the British nobility. The monarch appointed Dukes, Earls, Barons and Counts, each awarded both a domain and a responsibility. The nobles constituted themselves, as a whole, against the commoners and peons. They banded together to pass laws criminal, civil and religious, to ensure their hegemony and the integrity of the realm which preserved their position. Periodically, nobles warred with each other for supremacy under the ruler. See the Wars of the Roses, Cromwell, the Five Families of New York.

Over time, however, successful associations, born in brigandage, go straight. Today’s British monarchy is a ceremonial outfit, and the various American crime families, either disappeared with the times (see Boss Tweed’s control of New York through Irish immigrants), were changed by the times, or were subsumed by a larger and more powerful group (such as the Democratic Party). Repeal forced urban bootlegging mobs to branch out into drugs; two world wars impoverished Britain and its nobility; and Britain’s entrance into the European Union, after 900 years of power, was, in effect, that act of “going legit” — which, to any liberal looks like advanced reason, but which his enemies interpret correctly as inviting attack.

It seems the sole political entities that didn’t start as crime families have been the democracies. These emerge not from powerful scheming to create that order which will support them at the cost of their opponents, but from a consensus of the Wise or Concerned, legislating peace through understanding of human weakness, and the attendant need for justice and order. Democracies, then, like monarchies, must eventually fall when prosperity weakens resolve: when the fat cats rule only because their progenitors were strong.

But those Capos di Tutti Capi who have inherited their place must be inferior, in strength, reason and viciousness to their forebears for they did not win, but inherited their position.[1. We accept that the owner of an NFL team will bequeath his ownership to his descendants; but even they, happy in their enjoyment of primogeniture, would not hire a quarterback solely because his father was a Heisman winner. (See also the Greatest Generation and its inevitable aftermath.)] Anyone might inherit good looks or physical strength, but not perspicacity and resolve, and never to a degree equal to that matured through existential struggle.

***

Ancient Israel was the nexus of the Asian silk road and African and Mediterranean commerce. Merchandise, culture and fashion spread from the East over land and over the sea to Greece, to Sicily, and then to Italy.

The Sicilians inherited, adopted or had forced upon them many cultures, and, like any border people, sought safety in the Clan. For it was not that any current rulers and customs of the state might be supplanted, but that they would. What could be trusted but blood ties? Nothing.

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Designated Criminal

By David Mamet

The Sicilians (and the ‘Ndrangheta and Camorra tribes), always subject to conquest, could operate only as a state-within-a-state. They, and the Irish border folks, took their insights into the New World (see Ethnic America by Thomas Sowell, 1981). These became the political machines: organised crime was its harness-mate, and the crossbreeding (actual and ideological) gave birth to various American political dynasties.

These dynasties, like monarchy, attempted control of the mass through myth. The myth of the royals is the divine right of kings, and their wisdom, benignity and devotion to public service. This last — a low-cost, though fragile tool — is theoretically susceptible to public scrutiny through a free press. Absent this scrutiny, the myth of hereditary public service reveals its essential nature as the happy face of violence to the dissenting. We see this operation in religious wars, supposedly about doctrine, but, in essence, about hegemony.

***

Today, the Left’s protestation of benevolence is everywhere unsaid by its real threat of immediate ruin: the manner in which the various territorial claims of the Left’s clans — MeToo, Marxism, Feminism, Occupy, Anarchism and so on — spawn new collusion (intersectionality) and then aggression (gay rights vs. transgender rights) as one group tries to break to the rail. Life may be “the war of all against all”, but each prosecutes it with as much aid as he can muster; and that aid was, originally, the family.

The Scottish term for clan is Sept; the Hebrew word is Svat. Both mean seven; that is, the number of families making up a clan. The clan, then, is a military-company-sized group of individuals tied by blood, whose allegiance may be theoretically relied upon.

Yet the modern Left works, consciously or not, to destroy the family as the basic unit of loyalty, working to replace it with allegiance to the state, which can only mean those proclaiming themselves the champions of the state (political chieftains), the states’ incarnation (dictators), or their like in the states’ demise (effectively warlords). The decay of Western democracy has split the electorate into those accepting the new monolithic, unerring state and those preferring a constitutional accountability; that is, preferring democracy to subservience.

What of the family? For the past 50 years, it has been denounced as “the nuclear family” — and let’s note that, since 1946, the adjective has always meant “horrific”. The nuclear family has been destroyed: by technology, contraception, penicillin, travel and so on. Its destruction has been ascribed to the champions of its demise: humanism, globalism and atheism-as-reason. But these are only the beneficiaries of decay. In its place, membership to our various right-thinking groups is an unconscious attempt to reconstitute the family — that group which will offer protection. Just like life in the urban gangs.

***

The Hebrew Bible is the record of the growth of the state from the family. The family is the Jewish, religious polity. Chapter by chapter, mankind’s development is shown in the Bible through the family dynamic. Cain slays Abel out of jealousy; Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac; Jacob steals Esau’s birthright; his sons kidnap and abandon Joseph.

The last purely familial exchange is that between Moses and his step grandfather, Pharaoh. This will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a broken family. Pharaoh has raised Moses, effectively, to be his successor; but Moses displeases Pharaoh — not because he slew the Taskmaster (after all, he was the Prince of Egypt), but because he did so to protect a Jewish slave. Moses publicly demonstrated allegiance to that despised group from which he had been graciously rescued. He insulted the benevolence of his step-grandfather, who asked nothing of him but expected simple loyalty.

Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, and in the desert the Biblical struggles of the family are supplanted by the horrors of creating and maintaining a unified state. In the Exodus, clans, tribes and individuals plot mutiny, challenge, disobey and infuriate Moses, and the story changes from interfamilial dynamics to the birth of democracy — with individual freedom and equality constrained by obedience to law and threatened not by the disaffected individual but by faction.

Moses’s power is depleted by age and he is spared the horror of his people’s behaviour in the Promised Land. The eternal struggle for power, absent operative myth and its defence, devolves into decay and the reversion of the state into the family or clan.

The Godfather, our American Myth, is the contemporary rendition of Greek Drama. They portrayed the family members as gods and demigods, each embodying a recognisable human ambition and its inevitable attendant flaw. Greek wisdom and drama cross-decked to Sicily, and, thence, to Hollywood, and the Corleone Family is the house of Atreus.

Every family will have a no-good brother-in-law, a crazed aunt or grandfather, a drunk, a homosexual, an unutterable secret; the envied, the despised, the tolerated, the shunned. It is a compendium of humans — as flawed as we each know ourselves to be — endeavouring or constrained to live together under a set of customs, both based upon and engendering myth. For myth is the expression of an otherwise ungraspable perception; it grows from necessity, and persists as it is useful operationally. When it is supplanted as unreasonable, blasphemous or absurd, it creates the chaos allowing for new hegemony, and, thus, new myth.

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This, however, though asserting a new, rational content, can only be based upon that human consciousness which requires the comfort or control of myth — and, though it may change its content, it is psychologically bound to its form. The Twelve Tribes become the Twelve Caesars, just as the House of Atreus becomes the Kennedys.

Neither I nor you know much about that family, and much that we know may be false, exaggerated or hagiographic; but the Myth of the Kennedys is that of a family beloved by both the more benevolent of the Fates, and their less easily amused sisters.

Are they more depraved, luckless, criminal, perverted, violent and so on than the rest of us? Possibly, as their remove or immunity from scrutiny may, logically, induce excess. The protected antics of the great have an analogue in the 19th-century display of Spiritualism. Here, the medium demonstrated his supernatural powers, loosening himself from manacles, or producing displays of “ectoplasm”, requiring only that they be done in the dark. The Kennedys are certainly more prominent. And we are all addicted to gossip, which is not only more exciting but less taxing than reason, and under whose sway we are enthused with licensed salaciousness — and a momentary sense of superiority to those we envy and fear.

© David Mamet 2023

The entire debate, like the rest of recorded history, is available to watch on YouTube and is instructive in all kinds of ways. Many regard it as the moment that TV became the final arbiter in politics. When, as Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we moved from the Typographical Age to the Age of Show Business.

Looking at it today it is hard to see it in that light. It seems hesitant and apologetic, and still rather bookish. Like most Sixties’ current affairs programming, from Firing Line to Blue Peter, one is struck by the simplicity of the sets, the static camera work, and the almost offensive levels of decorum shown by the participants. One might think the two would-be POTUSES (POTI? PsOTUS?) … one might think they were joint participants in a school prize giving, for all the acrimony visible.

Kennedy makes no jibes about Nixon’s conk. Not once does Nixon, for his part, take advantage of Kennedy’s tantalising middle initial. Neither man references the size of the other’s package, hints that the other is on the nursery slopes of dementia or accuses him of harbouring prejudice against any specific ethno-religious group (there was really only one that mattered, to be fair — Christian Americans — although JFK’s Catholicism would come under scrutiny in due course).

Nevertheless, the criteria on which their respective performances were judged in these debates notoriously set the tone for the coming decades. Kennedy wowed the electorate as much with his evident vigour and hamster-cheeked good looks as his grasp of the challenges facing America. Nixon, on the other hand, was only recently out of hospital. A knee injury sustained while campaigning had become infected — Nixon was a septic Sceptic. He looked wan, and Kennedy won — one nil.

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Could the Tories ever win the black vote?

By Mutaz Ahmed

There were four debates in all; but it remains the first that is legendary for the unfortunate Nixon, whose palour, sweatiness and even, it is said, poor choice of suit colour — it blended in with the background — all diminished him in the eyes of viewers. Remarkably, it is claimed that radio listeners, unable to see his furtive glances and glistening upper lip, believed that Nixon had won. Though that might easily reflect the demographic that chose to absorb the arguments through the more conservative medium to begin with.

Kennedy of course went on to win the race too, decisively in terms of the electoral college, which is what counts, though by a very narrow squeak in the popular vote — an interesting reverse of the divergence facing Republican and Democrat candidates today. Camelot lasted barely three years, before he was gunned down on November 22, 1963, leaving Lyndon B Johnson, who stepped up to steer the USA through its various mid-Sixties convulsions — from Civil Rights to the Vietnam War. Be careful what you wish for.

Nixon meanwhile became well aware of the power and the pitfalls of TV campaigning from then on, and swiftly mastered the art. He eventually won the election of 1968, and was re-elected in 1972, only to leave the office less than two years later under the most ignominious circumstances of any Presidential departure in History, though arguably preferable to those of Kennedy. One might say of both men, be careful what you wish for.

Ever since then, TV audiences have looked to TV to provide then with a short cut, a clue to the character of the candidate they are faced with that will enable them to confidently back or decisively reject them without having to do all that boring manifesto stuff. Like professional poker players, they know the real game is never where your gaze is being directed. They hope for a tell. A twitch, a guilty start, a darting eye. And human nature being what it is, whatever they are really hoping to see, they will.

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A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

Reporting on the TV debates and interviews has focused almost entirely on what one might call the Nixonian details. Corbyn’s glasses, slightly askew on one occasion. Was Johnson more or less stammering than usual, when challenged over his lifetime record of mendacity and half-truth? Did the BBC really edit out derisive laughter from his interview? Did Channel 4 deliberately mishear Boris Johnson as saying that “immigrants of colour” were to be welcomed but only under democratic control?

I have seen perhaps two or three serious attempts by well-informed journalists to analyse and cost the manifesto promises of the parties, in language ordinary people might understand, for every hundred excited jabberings about who has got the wind in their sales, or looked exhausted, defeated, or fat.

For my money, however, the most telling interview was a BBC exclusive with a young woman who was asked what issues she would be considering before deciding how to vote. She said that she felt she had not been properly informed of the issues — passive voice — and had not been adequately educated, and that consequently she tended to just vote the way her friends did. Their collective vote was it seemed a sort of emergent phenomenon, of the kind familiar to anyone who has attended a séance.

Now, as I always emphasise when I am trying to establish a rapport with young people, perhaps to discover who left seven wet towels on the bathroom floor, the main thing I look for is openness and candour. We can make no progress without these.

And tempting though it is to roll our eyes, this woman is being admirably honest and self aware. To a greater or lesser extent this is how millions of people decide.

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Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

Many develop a tribal loyalty to their first love and never re-examine the premises. They respond to peer-group consensus, however ill-informed, they think it is someone else’s fault that they are not better informed, and they wouldn’t read a manifesto in the loo while there are the backs of shampoo bottles to reach for. And it is perhaps worrying that many base these initial judgements on unexamined groupthink.

To the extent that they can be persuaded to switch tracks, they are strongly influenced by random but vivid visual stimuli of the kind that made 1960 famous. Unplanned, unscripted events that convince them they have accessed some fundamental, revealed truth about the character of the individuals they are being asked to vote for, an insight that will enable them to decide without having to grasp the implications of anyone’s fiscal or immigration policy. This is sometimes known as the availability heuristic.

Our would-be leaders are now trained to suppress all such revealing traits, of course. And while these things provide a brief flare in the darkness they rarely decide elections. The bacon sandwich may have done for Ed Miliband, but the young woman in the clip will not have found her prior beliefs challenged too hard by the past few week’s coverage. She will still trust her better informed friend, and will by now I suspect be familiar with that comfortable feeling of being able to fit anything that happens into her established world view, however second-hand and arbitrary she knows it to be.