This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

I wish I thought our fashionably liberal ruling classes, throughout what remains of the free world, would learn from the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. But they won’t. They are incapable of learning anything, ever.

After years of taunting, spiting, ignoring and scorning the rest of us and our opinions, they have now created a monster. President Trump is entirely their fault. But they blame others.

I have politely warned the liberal elite for years that they were taking this risk. I have many times said and written to such people: ‘Please listen to me now. Or you will end up having to listen to someone much, much nastier in future.’

They paid no attention to my careful dissection of their wrong policies. With very few exceptions, they treated me as either mad or wicked, much as they treat your opinions and concerns.

On they ploughed with their mass immigration, their diversity and equality, their contempt for lifelong, stable marriage, their refusal to punish crime, their mad, idealistic foreign wars, their indulgence of drugs, their scorn for patriotism, their schools and universities, turning out graduates with certificates they can barely read.

And on they went with their destruction of real jobs, promising a new globalised prosperity that never came. Millions have just had too much of this.

Even now the liberals squawk and gibber in a state of disbelief. They hold daft placards saying ‘Love Trumps Hate’, as if they have not for years hated the secret, inarticulate people, living in parts of the country they never visit and barely know exist, who have finally let rip with a yell of resentment and rage.

This yahoo, this bully, this groper, a man who threatened his opponent with jail, he surely cannot be preparing to live in the White House? Yes, he is. Those pictures of Barack Obama treating him with polite respect, they cannot be true? Yes, they are.

These ridiculous people, who have never wondered how others have viewed their own side’s billionaire-financed election victories in the past, are actually holding demonstrations against the result. I loathe Mr Trump for his coarseness, his crudity, and his scorn for morals, tradition and law. I am as sorry that he has won as they are, and fear that Britain will have its own Trump before long. But I can at least say that I tried to prevent it. They brought it about. We must all now wonder if he is what he claims to be, or just another politician prepared to say anything to win office, just a bit more shameless than the rest.

Neither of these possibilities is good. If he is what he says he is, and keeps his promises, then he is bound to do grave damage to the peace and stability of the USA.

The simplest test of that will be whether he tries to put Hillary Clinton in prison, the promise he made that most pleased his supporters. If he does not, then he is like a medieval wizard who has conjured up the Devil and now does not know how to send him back where he came from.

Mr Trump has so stirred the mob that they cannot be relied on to go home if he fails them.

They want the change and the revenge they were promised.

If they see that they will not get them, they will instead rally behind figures who will make Donald Trump look like John Major.

And this campaign has done so much damage to the USA, to its tolerance, to respect for the rule of law, to civility, that there is no telling where this may stop.

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Surely the most moving words written or spoken by anyone in the past year were Leonard Cohen’s message to his one-time lover Marianne Ihlen, when he learned that she was dying: ‘Know that I am so close behind you that, if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.’ And so he was, as we learned on Friday.

Set that beside the florid, bombastic attempts of politicians and preachers to move us, which fail. Note that almost every simple word has only one syllable.

What makes it so powerful is that he meant it.

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Yes, it's bitter - but Amy's new thriller is utterly brilliant

As long as you keep your eyes closed through the opening credits (which feature several rather large naked women doing performance art), by far the best film of the year is Nocturnal Animals, starring Amy Adams, left, and crammed with real suspense.

As a bonus, the film is also a strong, if bitter, argument in favour of constancy and fidelity, things Hollywood hasn’t always been keen on lately.

Brace yourself for a cold, dark winter

This could be the winter when our crazed policy of closing coal-fired power stations and building windmills finally produces the power cuts that we richly deserve. In a way, I hope it is. It might make us wake up before things get much worse.

Green dogma is quite a bit dafter than the beliefs of the Mormons that fashionable people like to mock. That is why I call these fanatics ‘Warmons’.

But it has taken over the minds of our politicians and civil servants to such an extent that – on this issue – our official policy is as crazy as anything in North Korea.

Let me sum it up. On the basis of an unproven theory about global warming, we are shutting down perfectly sound, high-capacity, coal-fired power stations and instead peppering the country with windmills that tend not to work when it is cold.

This is unhinged anyway. But since China builds a new coal-fired power station every few weeks, and we share the same atmosphere as China, this action does no good, even if you believe the theory.

In any case, our ability to cope with big surges of demand in a cold winter gets less all the time. Our nuclear generators are near the end of their lives.

France’s nuclear stations, which often fill the gap by sending French power under the Channel, are having problems of their own just now.

It could be that the only way to meet demand will be by activating reserve banks of diesel generators now on standby, perhaps the most polluting form of power there is.

The closure of coal-fired stations should stop now, and we should also immediately build new gas-fired plants in defiance of the Warmon fanatics. Our exit from the EU actually makes this much easier.

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