What eight years in the White House does to a man - and could do to a woman...

Even Barack Obama - who seems to have spent much of his presidency either playing golf or chumming around with his Hollywood pals - looks like he's put on about 25 years in the seven years between the start of 1999 and January 2016:

Bill Clinton fared better than most - but then, he was untroubled by a conscience, and never stinted himself when it came to frequent unscheduled bouts of vigorous exercise lasting no more than a few minutes at a time:

I hate to sound ageist. I'll be 64 in a couple of months, and I know a lot of people in their late 70s and early 80s who are a lot more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than I am (or would be, even if I were fighting fit). I've married into a family for whom the normal rules of ageing appear to have been suspended. Ronald Reagan was one of my political heroes - and he was 16 days short of his 70th birthday when he became president. Being elderly should not disbar people from doing many different kinds of job. But being the President of the United States of America who has to clear up the toxic debris left trailing in Obama's mephitic wake faces an overwhelming task.

For a start, he or she will have to appear strong - because that's the only thing that's going to impress the likes of Russia, Iran and China, who - in their various ways - have been making hay in the eight years during which the world's most powerful country has been effectively hollowed out by an eerily disengaged cultural Marxist weakling. Now is not the time for a shrewish, vindictive, loveless, terminally uncharismatic schoolmarm without a single fresh political idea in her addled head - and, it's becoming apparent,  a whole host of debilitating health issues to deal with, If this is how she looks now...

...what in the hell is she going to look like in four years time, let alone eight? More to the point, what sort of state is her body and her mind going to be in? No doubt it would be in Hillary Clinton's power to turn America into a nightmarish version of Brezhnev-era Russia by hiding herself away in the White House, constantly attended by an enormous team of doctors whose main task would be to patch her up in time for the next scheduled event which she simply has to attend. The supine White House press corps and the country's lapdog broadcasters will cover for her for a while. But, as she would be the most powerful human being on the planet, the rest of the world might start to notice - and would no doubt act accordingly.  

Almost any Republican candidate could have beaten Hillary Clinton: the sheer wilful arrogance and incompetence of the Republican Party has pretty much ensured that it's going to be Donald Trump. As Charlton Heston's character shouts at the end of Planet of the Apes after realising that the object sticking up out of the sand is the head of the Statue of Liberty - "Damn you - God Damn you all to hell!"