Having a degree of success in business clearly wasn’t enough to fill that void and left him feeling there must be something more to life. Instead of working out what it was he chose to drive himself on to make even more money and become a multi billionaire. Then he discovered that this still wasn’t making him feel happy about himself. So he tried becoming a public figure and establishing himself as a media star by hosting the Apprentice in the US. That too wasn’t fulfilling. All that was left was to try for President. Now even that isn’t sufficient.
What kind of President feels the need to criticise a war widow the day after she buries her husband because he is sensitive about his own hurt feelings but not about hers? What kind of President mocks a member of his own party for being captured in a war? What kind of President checks the rating figures on a TV show that he used to host and needs to mock the new host for having lower ratings than him? What kind of President needs to boast quite so often and is quite so sensitive to the slightest suggestion of disloyalty? And what sort of man needs to tell his friends in the locker room about how he grabs women by the pussy and they let him get away with it because he is famous?
Insecurity sits at the heart of Donald Trump’s soul and that is a big worry for all of us. Who knows what he will need to try next in a desperate attempt to prove to himself that he has worth?
But I rather suspect he isn’t completely alone. The way a lot of British MPs have been behaving in their private life doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that the country is being led by a set of balanced individuals with a strong and secure understanding of their own psychology. Desperately seeking affection is the kindest way you can describe some of their behaviour. Deliberately using power to try and get sexual favours is closer to the mark.
There is a long and ignoble history of British politicians and sex scandals. It is not so very long since a Conservative MP killed himself by accidentally strangling himself because he’d discovered he could get a slightly better quality of erection through a near death experience. Nor should it be forgotten that the entire Conservative Government lost an election after being brought down by a sex scandal in the late 1960s.
Indeed the existence of quite so many sex scandals, drink problems, dodgy financial deals and other forms of bad behaviour has historically been so widespread that the whips office has had the reputation of routinely using knowledge of MPs unrevealed weaknesses to bully them into voting the way they wanted.
All of which makes the appointment of the Chief Whip as Defence Secretary a strange move from Theresa May. The reason for the appointment is clear. She has a desperate shortage of reliable loyalists inside the Cabinet and she simply couldn’t afford to lose one to a sex scandal unless she replaced him with someone even more likely to support her. This could easily prove to be a fatal calculation.
If the whips office has moved on from past practices of holding MPs to ransom using information that would destroy their careers then nothing much will go wrong. Just suppose for a second that the whips office hasn’t given up on that rather useful tool in its armoury and was still doing it during the run up to the latest scandals. How long will the new Defence Secretary survive if it turns out that he knew a great deal of information about sexual harassment or other bad habits of MPs and didn’t report that to the correct authorities or go through any kind of due process? Will voters be pleased to discover that their local MP is a sex pest but they weren’t told because it helped the government to keep him under control? Can a Minister of Defence appointed as part of a cleaning of the stables survive if – and I stress the importance of the if here – if it turns out he knew all about some of the dirty practices?
There is potential for an even more serious phase of the current crisis if – once again that important word – if it turns out that the whips kept quiet about the dirt on their MPs. Can May’s government survive if any serious problems emerge over who knew what and didn’t tell and she has to lose her latest appointee?
In one way I hope that she can because this isn’t a one party problem and I actually think she can be trusted to set up a process that will create a much more rigorous and easily accessed complaints procedure that produces fair and meaningful results for those who complain and those who are complained about.
In almost every other respect I think the UK needs her government to fall and fall quickly. There is only so much utter incompetence and confusion the nation can be expected to put up with and we are in serious need of a change.