An email is currently in circulation, purporting to be from the Queen, suggesting to Americans that their 240-year-old experiment of self-government has finally failed. Rather than choose between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, might they agree to the restoration of British rule? Some Americans have actually written to Her Majesty, asking if she’d accept a new colony. One was astonished to receive a written reply from Buckingham Palace saying that such interference was, nowadays, out of the question. But it’s far from the craziest proposition to have been aired in the past few months – and in a country where the improbable is happening rather a lot.

After George W Bush’s re-election in 2004, many on the American Left succumbed to Bush Derangement Syndrome: a condition in which loathing of a victor causes you to curse, seethe and cease making any sense to anyone. Today, Trump Derangement Syndrome is spreading among conservatives world over. They compete with each other to find a vocabulary dark enough to denounce The Donald. They scorn him, and everything he stands for. But if he is such a monster, what does that say about the one-in-three Americans who back him?