In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organisation in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme. I also liked her way – now highly unusual in US politics – of addressing foreign policy and setting it in the context of her general political beliefs. At that time, she was mulling the presidential bid she launched the following year. Today, after Iowa, she remains in the race, but only just. Why would such a presentable and decent person not be preferred to Donald Trump? One factor, which one sees in Rishi Sunak too, could be the intense respectability of her middle-class, provincial Indian heritage, rather like that of Apu, the charming and diligent Indian grocer nowadays cancelled from The Simpsons. Respectability can be inhibiting. Respectable people are not usually forces of nature, and would not want to be. They believe almost devoutly in hard work and its just rewards. They therefore do not grasp the performative or the visceral aspects of politics. Donald Trump, triumphant in Iowa, is almost everything that Nikki Haley isn’t. Such is the force of his nature that he has persuaded millions he is the man who gets things done. Whenever he doesn’t get things done – his four years of supreme power provide ample evidence of this – he convinces people it is only because the wicked establishment blocks him. It is a frustrating spectacle: both the hopes Trump raises in his supporters and the fears he inspires in his opponents are largely illusory. He won’t do what he says, but what he says is sufficiently exciting to hide this basic flaw.

BBC Verify is a strange concept. The name suggests that, to adapt Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase, it seeks truth from facts. Surely an entire news organisation, not a special department, is supposed to do that. Since Verify exists, however, why not investigate how many people have been killed in Gaza? On 11 January, the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, asserted on air that Israel ‘is killing hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians every day’. If the phrase ‘hundreds and hundreds’ means anything more than the single word ‘hundreds’, it must surely mean a minimum of 500, and implies more. If Israel had killed 500 a day since it struck back against Hamas in mid-October, that would amount to nearly 45,000 dead by the time Bowen spoke. The death toll is terrible, but such a figure is wild. Even the Hamas health ministry, no truth-teller, puts the total figure at 24,000. Verify should inquire. If it did so, it should seek to find out more about the categories of people who get killed, and ask questions about who is killing whom. Israel claims that 9,000 of the dead are terrorists (not all of them Hamas). That is a success, not an atrocity. Israel does not claim total accuracy, but says that, because of the nature of the fighting, it is easier at this stage to estimate dead armed opponents than it is to arrive at a proper number for unarmed civilians. That will be attempted after victory. It also points out that Hamas has dropped a quarter of its bombs and rockets inside Gaza, killing Gazans. Verify could look at those claims too.

The latest figure shows that the population of China fell by two million last year. Xi Jinping’s favourite word to describe his own achievements is ‘rejuvenation’. A more accurate word would be ‘senescence’. It is striking that Xi is 70, Vladimir Putin is 71, Narendra Modi is 73, Joe Biden is 81 and his most probable successor, Donald Trump, is 77, their palsied hands struggling for mastery of the globe.

In our Christmas issue, Douglas Murray attempted to cheer us up by saying that the English equivalent of La France profonde still exists: he had seen it recently in Wiltshire, he reported. I want to agree, but I wonder if I really do (not about Wiltshire, but about the general proposition). A deep England – or France, or any country old enough to possess such an essence – depends on various conditions which may no longer apply. One is that life is not everywhere heavily dependent on the country’s capital city. If you consider the various factors – house prices, road and rail networks, job and retirement patterns, media power, sources of wealth, money management, the uniformity of so many shops etc, I think you would have to agree that London dominates almost everywhere in England, even for people who never go near the place. If you read a book like Corduroy by Adrian Bell (father of Martin, the Man in the White Suit), which describes his experience of mainly agricultural life in Suffolk in the 1920s, you find a community which, while not remote, lived its own English life in its own way. A century later, only a few wisps of such a culture survive in rural England and tiny numbers work on the land. The equivalent applies to the provincial England of market towns and small manufacturing. Some of these places remain attractive. Many have become in some ways more interesting than they were in the past, but hardly any have that ur-quality – that sense of a place where, in Eliot’s famous phrase (of Little Gidding) ‘history is now and England’. To use another line from Four Quartets, ‘the dancers are all gone under the hill’.

As is traditional, the editor has kindly let me advertise the Annual General Meeting of the Rectory Society in this space. Our guest speaker this year is Emma Bridgewater, the great ceramics manufacturer. She will speak about pilgrimage. The meeting will be held on Tuesday 6 February, at Chelsea Old Church, starting at 6.30 p.m. and ending at eight. Doors open at six. Tickets, which cost £25, should be booked by emailing the secretary, Alison Everington, at ali@everington.net.