Instead of adhering to the official pro-life stance that women were victims of an over-enthusiastic abortion lobby, he made the anti-abortion case look like one more species of misogyny – as if his next suggestion might be that women who commit adultery should be stoned.

Taken alongside the refusal to apologise for his press spokesman manhandling a female reporter, and his obscene insults to a woman television interviewer, this seemed to fit quite comfortably with his own chosen public image. What it has done to the image of the Republican Party may take a generation to overcome.

So, as Mr Trump might say, what is going on here? Have voters become so fed up with being governed by professional politicians that they are prepared to choose self-proclaimed know-nothing amateurs? The Trump phenomenon should have been too preposterous even for plausible satire. And here at home, the comic sideshow that is Corbynite Labour is being taken seriously by grown-ups who should remember the consequences of his dogma in the 1970s. Maybe we should have seen this coming from the moment when politics became a branch of the advertising industry and appeared to have cracked the eternal code for winning elections.