Moscow To the Union Jack pub on Potapovsky Lane for a US election night party. The jolly Muscovite Trump supporters who organised the event had gone to the effort of providing girls with tight--fitting Trump-Pence T-shirts and Make America Great Again baseball caps. In pride of place beside the bar hung a specially commissioned triptych of oil paintings — heroic Soviet-style portraits of Russia’s new heroes: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.

Donald J. Trump always keeps everyone guessing. Is the president-elect ditching his crazy act in order to bring in a conventional Republican government? Or ditching conventional Republican government in order to bring in his crazy act? Is he bringing together the anti--politics outsiders and the Washington insiders? Or is he playing them against each other? Are we witnessing the usual scramble for power that accompanies every incoming administration? Or is the Trump transition a new kind of shambles? The answer to all these questions is yes, probably.

Trump’s victory sets a test for conservatives, a test they are failing with embarrassing ineptitude. They are making the oldest mistake in politics. They are carrying on as if nothing has changed. In the early 21st century, it was easy to attack the supposed liberal left. These alleged liberals were for real censorship. The white working class was their enemy. Radical Islam was the fascism of the time, yet liberals who thought themselves anti-fascists accepted that misogyny, prejudice and hatred of individual rights were fine, as long as the haters had brown rather than white skin.

“Is she really going out with him?’ asks the old Joe Jackson song about a mixed-attractiveness couple. ‘They say that looks don’t count for much — there goes your proof.’ High society used to abound with couples in which the woman was far more beautiful than the man. But while we can still point to famous aesthetically mismatched partners (pudgy Trump and pulchritudinous Melania anyone?), the mating patterns of the young now mean we are witnessing the death of the mixed-attractiveness couple.

‘A more thrilling, uplifting, glorious way of living has yet to be invented,’ the jockey John Francome said of National Hunt racing. Watching last weekend’s action from Cheltenham racecourse, it was easy to see what he meant. Now is when the National Hunt — or jump — season really gets under way. The summer months are about flat racing, although these days flat racing goes on through the winter, too. There are now six all-weather racetracks in the UK; the latest, Newcastle, opened earlier this year.