Deborah Friedell

Bill Clinton called the White House the ‘crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system’ but that’s not the way Jill Biden saw it. On becoming first lady, she was transported into a ‘magical place’, an enchanted castle where wishes could be conjured into being. It wasn’t just that she could call down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and summon a cheeseburger, but that the building itself seemed to anticipate her desires.

The Gettys​ were one of the richest families in the world, and Gavin Newsom’s father was their ‘consigliere’. In 1973, when John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Calabrian mafia, it fell to Bill Newsom to fly to Italy to get him back. At first he suspected that his godson – ‘Little Paul’, a trust fund kid locked out of his trust – might have staged his own abduction, but changed his mind when an Italian newspaper received Paul’s severed ear in the post.

Donald Trump​ began seriously thinking about running for office in 1998, so it’s said, when the wrestler Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura won the Minnesota governorship on the Reform Party ticket. Ventura’s campaign had been dismissed as a sideshow by Democrats and Republicans alike. He was no one’s idea of a professional politician and he made that the point. Only a true outsider, he insisted, could blow up the rigged system.