Would you welcome Donald Trump to the UK?

“Welcome” might not be quite the word I’d choose, but sure – let’s get Donny over to the good ol’ UofK and show him the true meaning of great British hospitality.

He’s a polarising chap, isn’t he? At least with Marmite, people who hate the gloopy brown stuff have a choice of whether or not to consume it. With Trump, every time you look at the news, there he is – looking like he’s rolled face-first on the floor of the Wotsits factory, and spouting something that usually has people cheering or frothing at the mouth.

On his trip to the UK last year, which was originally intended to be a state visit, the wave of public disapproval at the idea meant he popped over briefly, managed to ignore all normal protocols when he met the Queen (who’d have thought he’d be in any way disrespectful to a woman?) and brought us together as a nation for a rare moment.

Whilst Brexit continues to divide us, Donald’s appearance meant the public united to protest about the Orange One’s arrival, launch a ManBaby blimp of Trump in a nappy, and come up with some of the most brilliantly scathing and pithy placard messages ever to have graced a bit of board nailed to some 2x2 - ‘Super callous fragile racist sexist Nazi POTUS’ deserves particular praise for neatly summing up the US president’s key characteristics to the tune of a classic family movie song.

So, sure – let’s get Trumpy over here. He can visit lots of lovely places, and discover that everywhere he goes there are thousands of Brits making sure he knows what we think of him, using our unique blend of very British characteristics to their full effect – sarcasm, politeness, subtle-wordplay, righteous indignation, dark humour... it’ll be a really beautiful thing. Really beautiful. Everybody says so. We might even queue to do it, too.

See you soon, Donald, but remember - There will be hell toupee.

This post first appeared as part of The Mail's "Taking To The Podium" page, on Monday the 6th of May 2019. The new format is a question that columnists give their response to. I've got a idea of what it will look like, following the first outing last week, where the responses were from local MPs. (See the picture.)

I won't get my print copy through the post for a few days, so it'll be interesting to see how it appears.

To say I got short notice of the topic would be a serious understatement. I was emailed at 0930 on Wednesday, and they wanted the response by lunchtime on Thursday. This would normally have been OK, except that I was at an AGM all evening, so wound up writing my response first thing in the morning before work. As it happens, it came easily - a surprisingly quick 20 minutes!

I'm not sure how many writers will be responding - presuming three, but the question was emailed to only two of us.

(Tape time: No 183 - a bootleg version of Queen's 1986 Wembley gig, probably from the mixing desk - crowd noise is almost non-existent, and it's tinny as hell!)

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