Trump lacks decency and dignity just like Putin, Hitler and Mao — and poor Charles is forced to meet him

Far be it from me to sympathise with the Royals but I do feel rather sorry for King Charles having to face the prospect of another meeting with Donald Trump next year. The government is wheeling him out to try to save the much vaunted £30billion tech deal announced when Agent Orange swaggered around Windsor on his state visit earlier this year. Now predictably, given that it is an agreement concocted by the president, it is in trouble and on hold. 

The odds are that Charles and Camilla will go to Washington in April. It will be a full-on charm offensive with the aim of charming the most offensive man ever to sit in the Oval Office. And, reverting to my former role of Madame Petulengro, the Drone's seer, I predict that once the niceties are over and the couple are back, it will do nothing to help the so-called Special Relationship, a friendship that has survived all post-war US leaders including that old crook Nixon.

The current incumbent is interested only in power, money and self-aggrandisement with no affection for the UK, however he might protest his Scottish roots. We should face it: as long as he clings to power his focus will be away from Europe, which he despises, and instead he will cosy up to tyrants like Putin and China's Xi Jinping, the obscenely rich Arab potentates and the smaller, weaker players of South America who have something Trump wants — their oil. They all have something in common; they have no truck with democracy and as every day passes, it is clear this uncouth fool wants rid of it too. 

He must be the first American president with no knowledge of, or regard for, history, of the ties that bind us and of the good the Western Alliance has done during and since WW2. He lies whenever he opens his mouth and we know that his real interest in an end to the war in Ukraine, just as in Gaza, is to ensure there will be something in it for Trump Family Inc. He claims to be a champion of free speech yet whenever a  reporter asks him a question he doesn't like, he calls them "stoopid, moronic, piggy" and "working for a terrible fake noos organisation". At the drop of a hat he sues media groups which call him out and as we all know, hopes the BBC will be good for $10billion. And now five British citizens have been barred from entering the US because of their social media history criticising him. George Orwell, where are you? 

Our old friend Max Hastings, writing in The Times on Saturday, says nobody can guess how the Trump assault on the BBC will play out "because he wields unprecedented power unchecked by personal dignity or decency". He is right, the man is devoid of both those traits which most of us have. They are the qualities which make people good, capable of love and compassion and the need to care for others. They make us all human in fact. 

Dignity and decency; Putin clearly lacks them, so did Hitler and Stalin and Mao. They just craved power for power's sake. Welcome to the club Donald.

*****

We are all getting older by the day (obvs) but the alternative is...well we know what that is. I was expressing this decidedly un-profound thought to one of our number when I heard that our old friend Bill Hagerty had died aged 86 on Boxing Day. He was a good man and a terrific journalist. Bill had been on the Daily Sketch (of blessed memory) before I arrived there and went on to the Mirror Group, editing the Sunday People from 1991.

Our time together came when I gathered a team in 1996 to produce a dummy for a new mid-market Sunday paper to take on the ailing Sunday Express, and the Mail on Sunday which hadn't quite got off the ground. For a couple of months our little band was ensconced in secret in offices in Cavendish Square and a starry lot we were; Mike Molloy, Christopher Wilson (our very own Wislon), Kate Hadley, John Hill and Bill. There were various others who shall remain nameless because at the time they were gainfully employed by the very papers we were targeting and (more likely) because my memory is no longer too good. 

It was a six-section product (news, sport, TV, money, wimmin and a mag) and, with obvious exceptions, we tried to do it 'as live'. Wislon got a genuine exclusive, that David Hockney was moving back from sunny California to not-so-sunny Bridlington. The paper — Life on Sunday was the working title — went down well with the advertisers. But (obviously) it never happened and it's just as well because the money behind it was Mohamed Fayed's who we knew was eccentric but not the monster he turned out to be.

Hagerty was in the role of managing editor, pulling together all the pieces and recruiting a team to cover politics, and he was brilliant. In the words of Wislon he was "charming, amused, colossally on top of the job and a pleasure to be with both in the office and in the pub". He certainly was and we will miss him. 

While on the grim subject of friends leaving us, I was pleased to see a delightful comment below my obit of Richard Compton Miller in The Times from Nicholas Coleridge. Coleridge, titan of magazines, now Provost of Eton, said: "Richard was immensely kind to me as a young journalist. I owe him" and goes on to disclose that in the '70s he was known as the Brompton Gorilla to rhyme with Compton Miller. Over lunch on Christmas Day I was asked if it wasn't a bit grim writing obits of friends.

Not really, I said, because you have to be still alive to do it.

*****

AND FINALLY

A treat of Billy Wilder films over Christmas included Double Indemnity and Some Like it Hot. We all know the closing line to Some Like It when Joe E Brown, on discovering that his bride-to-be Tony Curtis is a man, joked "Well nobody's perfect", but there's an equally good gag early in Wilder'a film noir Double Indemnity when insurance salesman Fred MacMurray is shown by a maid into a sitting room to wait. She tells him not to get any ideas, the drinks cupboard is locked.

"That's ok, I always bring my own keys". 

PS: Happy New Year to one and all.

ALAN FRAME

30 December 2025