The hospitality union in Nevada criticised Bernie because his healthcare-for-all program threatened their own private insurance plan, yet their members ignored the leadership's advice and voted for him anyway. How much is this to do with socialism and how much to do with Bernie? The irony is that while Corbyn is privately charming (so I'm told), Sanders can be short-tempered and rude. He is a loner. Some of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust. His father died when he was 20, his mother when he was 18. When he moved to rural Vermont, Bernie lived in a former sugar shack with a dirt floor. He released a financial disclosure in 1976 that read: "Unfortunately, there is not too much to report." Bernie Sanders always looks like he's running for a bus, according to Larry David. Credit:AP He always looks, as the comedian Larry David said, like he's been running for a bus. His character was captured in a vignette by journalist Anand Giridharadas, who recalls that when they travelled together on a plane, Bernie hardly spoke to him "in any real way", until they came to get into a car and there wasn't enough room to fit everybody in.

Bernie was then overcome with a "transfixing, physical sense of righteousness. It wasn't about logistics; it was about justice". He did everything he could to find the journalist space — move some bags, sit on a case — and in his determination to put something right, he became clear to Giridharadas for the first time: Bernie isn't the man you want to sit next to on a long boat ride because he's got no chat. But he is "the person who will notice when you fall overboard and begin to drown". A Bernie rally is like no other. He invites the audience to come up and speak, to talk about how they lost their house or their job. "It isn't about me," he insists, "it's about them." Unusually for a politician, this is probably true. If he gets the nomination, the 2020 race will be a battle between a business nationalist and an international socialist, but also between ego and anti-ego, between "This is my land" and "This is your land". And yet, Trump and Sanders have so much in common. Both men are New Yorkers, shout a lot, compete for the affection of the working class and are accused of being backed by the Kremlin. Bernie Sanders isn't so much the American Jeremy Corbyn as he is the Left-wing Donald Trump, which begs the question - are the Democrats happy to be captured and converted in the same way that Trump took over the Republicans? If not, why haven't they put up a better fight? I've seen this election compared to 1972, when the Democrats nominated George McGovern and McGovern — an ultraliberal tagged, unfairly, as the candidate of acid, amnesty and abortion — went down to a huge defeat in the autumn election. But there are two differences from 1972. Loading

First, the country has changed: it is more socially liberal now, and ethnic minority voters, who seem drawn to Bernie, are in the ascendant. Secondly, in 1972, the Democrats split properly over McGovern because the party contained serious moderates and conservatives who didn't like what he stood for on principle. That doesn't hold up today. Pete Buttigieg or Joe Biden might spend the rest of the primaries calling Bernie a Marxist, but everything Bernie is for is merely the logical extension of what Pete and Joe have signed up to as well: free stuff, abortion on demand, weak borders, etc. The Democrats' failure to say a definitive "no" to the far-Left in the last decade has paved the way for a socialist nominee, just as the Republican tolerance of racism made a Trump nomination more likely in 2016. Yes, Bernie can be stopped in the coming weeks but his opposition is fractured and hollow. If Bernie does win, Pete and Joe will come to the convention and endorse him and pretend that they loved him all along because when parties stand for nothing, they can be captured by anyone. Under these circumstances, Mike Bloomberg must consider an independent candidacy. Another New Yorker, another outsider. That state has a lot to answer for.

The Telegraph, London