Monday
If this is the beginning of the end – and it feels risky even to say it out loud – it seems fitting that, for Donald Trump, it has come via something as dreary as a liability for fraud. After all the salacious comments, the civil liability for rape and the alleged hush money to the porn star, not to mention the 91 criminal charges across four jurisdictions, this week, the spectre of professional ruin rose for Trump in more sober form; death via a thousand documents for the man who hates details.
The ruling by Judge Arthur Engoron came as a surprise, pre-empting as it did a trial due to open in Manhattan next week, in which Letitia James, the attorney general, accuses Trump and his eldest sons of inflating the value of their business to defraud banks and insurers. Judge Engoron agreed, saying that financial statements submitted by Trump “clearly contain fraudulent valuations”. Among the 10 businesses listed as fraudulently overvalued are Trump Tower in Manhattan, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, and that golf club in Scotland.
An appeal will get under way. In the meantime, the judge took the unusual step of ordering Trump’s business certificates, without which he can’t operate, buy real estate or take out a loan in the state of New York, to be cancelled. There is some confusion about how this may play out in reality and there was no timeframe attached to the judgment. You can force closure on a golf club overnight, but you can’t evict tenants from Trump Tower and, if a caretaker authority is to be installed, who are tenants to pay rent to in the meantime?
And so the sick feeling returns, that familiar sense of euphoria as Trump’s end seems once again to hove into view, swiftly followed by plunging disappointment in case it’s a mirage. Trump’s lawyers called the ruling an effort to “nationalize” his business, while Trump popped up to call Judge Engoron “deranged”, something that won’t help him when the trial goes ahead, next week, to ascertain the size of the penalty (Letitia James is seeking $250m). In the meantime, let’s enjoy this brief period when we may, unfettered, imagine a future in which New York exists without Trump’s name stamped anywhere upon it.
Tuesday
It’s the toughest call of the week, but one we must make in the interests of fairness: if you had to – if there was a gun at your head – who would you choose, Dan Wootton or Laurence Fox? This is speculation courted by the gentlemen themselves, of course, who on Tuesday night opened the debate about sexual allure with a conversation on GB News about the relative attractiveness of a female journalist. “Who’d want to shag that?” said Fox and Wootton chuntered in amiable agreement.
In relation to the two men, then, let us consider that question. Laurence Fox, who looks like an unoccupied Scream mask or a wet towel hanging on a door knob, might, I guess, have some Inspector Lewis anecdotes to distract one from his more obvious shortcomings. Dan Wootton, who looks like a man who came second in X-Factor in 2005 and has been to some very dark places since then, reminds me, oddly, of a papier-mache head we made in primary school and that was discreetly put in a cupboard after we’d finished. Anyway, Dan might be less chatty than Fox, who is a very chatty Cathy, isn’t he, and that would be a mercy. Since their conversation on Tuesday night, both men have been suspended from GB News and Wootton has lost his column in MailOnline, and, honestly, between the two of them, I can’t make the call. You’d take the veil first, of course.
Wednesday
Held up against Wootton and Fox – they sound like a failed building society – Matt Hancock starts to look almost appealing. Well, not appealing, obviously, but sort of harmless, like a character Kenneth Grahame cut from Wind in the Willows for being too implausibly damp. On Wednesday, Hancock appeared on TV after submitting himself for money to the kind of grilling he has somehow evaded in more formal journalistic or committee-room settings, in Channel 4’s SAS-based reality show, Who Dares Wins. Sweating gently, skin aglow, Hancock mumbled and fumbled through a line of tough questioning by a man pretending to be Liam Neeson in one of those kidnap movies.
“I fell in love with somebody ... and had to resign from government,” said Hancock, skipping a few key moments in his tenure as health secretary, and mistaking the mood of the British public post-pandemic to that of an audience watching Four Weddings and a Funeral. The SAS guy wasn’t buying it. “You think you’re gonna break the rules here, break the rules there. As far as I’m concerned, you showed weak leadership.” Then someone came in, put a bag over Hancock’s head and cemented his reputation as a man for whom no level of debasement is too great for the money.
Thursday
There are so many stories I love about Michael Gambon, whose death at the age of 82 was announced on Thursday. I love the one in which he took his friend, Terence Rigby, who was afraid of flying, up in a light aircraft and pretended to have a heart attack at the controls. I love the one in which he tampered with various scripts to troll pompous playwrights; and the one in which, when an American journalist asked him what he thought his character in Samuel Beckett’s, Eh Joe, who is silent throughout the play, was doing up on stage, replied “watching East Enders”.
My favourite Gambon story, however, is one he told years ago in the course of an interview. He found pomposity unbearable, possibly as a hangover from working with Laurence Olivier back in the day. At the Hay-on-Wye literary festival once, Gambon found himself in the audience of what he described to me as a “quite heavy” talk by David Hare. During questions, Gambon raised his hand and, asked, archly, “David, in all your years in showbusiness, have you ever met Diana Rigg?” It brought the house down and Hare “was quite cross”, said Gambon. “Good question, wasn’t it? ‘Showbusiness’ – that would’ve hurt.”
Friday
Not enough praise has been directed towards Dannii Minogue, one of the few people who can hold her head high in relation to where she stood on Russell Brand 15 years ago. The sorts of people who loved Brand back then would, I suspect, not have loved Dannii Minogue, but here she is in 2006, talking to the Mirror and referring to Brand as a “vile predator” who made “shocking remarks that I can’t even repeat”. This position would’ve been considered embarrassingly unfun back then, but Dannii wasn’t having any of it. Discussing it with an Australian friend this week, she pointed out, correctly, that you can’t get one over a Minogue and in a vernacular, I never fail to find charming, mused, “Dannii’s told him to rack off.” Quite so.
