When it comes to political pundits and their siamese twins, the pollsters, surely it's a case of three strikes and you're out? First, there was the Conservative election victory of 2015, when a total of exactly zero professional know-alls predicted an overall Tory majority. Then there was the Brexit referendum earlier this year, which they all got wrong. And now we have Trump's triumph against the Wicked Witch of the West, which -yet again - pretty much every highly-paid political guru and pretty much every pollster (with the exception of the USC/LA Times tracker poll) got wrong. Spectacularly wrong, in fact.
I believed the experts every time. I was expecting a narrow Conservative win last year- but not an overall majority; a 10-point loss for Brexit; and a Barry Goldwater-style landslide humiliation for Trump. Because that's what the professional prognosticators had told me to expect, and I was naive enough to believe that they would by now have taken their own left-liberal biases into account, and allowed for that in their predictions. Not a bit of it: CNN (the Clinton News Network) had Hillary five points ahead on polling day. Let's all now all agree on one undeniable fact: when conservative voters are asked how they intend to vote, many of them lie. Shocking, I know - but true. They lie because the left-liberal establishment seeking their opinion has spent decades telling them that being a conservative means you are a bad person. Ask a left-winger how they're going to vote, and they'll tell you the truth, because, for decades, the left-liberal establishment has assured them that being a left-liberal means you are a good person.
As for the punditerati here and in the States, it may be a cliché to assert that they and their narrow circle of like-minded chums live in a hermetic echo-chamber where their innate political prejudices are cosily affirmed 24/7 - but it's evidently true: my 20 years at the BBC confirmed this phenomenon, because there were very few days when my own innate political prejudices weren't dismissed as either eccentric or wicked (I heard the phrase "You can't really believe that" constantly).
So, here I go again. Rather than spending the next few years jeering at, ignoring, despising, undermining, and endlessly criticising the people who voted for the Conservatives (or for UKIP), for Brexit, and for Trump - why don't the BBC, Sky News, CNN, ABC News, NBC, and the useless polling companies urgently address the task of removing the beams of bigotry from their own eyes, rather than endlessly shrieking about the motes in ours? For instance, I watched a report by some young British female reporter on Sky the other day, in which she berated a young Trump supporter for (I think) not being able to express clearly exactly why he was voting for The Donald. Probably, I thought, because he's sick and tired of being sneered at by silly, self-righteous, sneering little lefties like you, dear.
It's time to drain the left-liberal media swamp. As for me, I will never again believe a word these people say, because their predictions are evidently based on nothing more solid than their own desires and prejudices. We, the people outside the echo-chamber, seem to have grasped this: I'm not sure the media are capable of doing so.
I'm not delighted that Trump won. But I am utterly delighted that Hillary Clinton and the left-liberal establishment lost.
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