Unlike elsewhere, especially Spain, our winter’s been pretty pleasant so far. Nice light, lots of mist and sun and crunching leaves.

By rights, we should be settling in around the fire for cosy craic, sipping hot whiskies and entertaining canvassers.

But that was before we got bad news from the west. The Orange Messiah is back. There’s no more Mister Nice Guy and the gargoyles in Moscow and Tel Aviv are over the moon.

Terrible war is being waged by man and machine in Ukraine, Gaza and South Lebanon. Orcs and droids and bolts from the blue. Terminator, Vlad the Impaler and Bibi the Bastard mash-up with Mad Max and Game Of Thrones.

Meanwhile, there’s drought and bloodshed in the Sudan and catastrophic weather in Spain.

Peace and goodwill and the comforts of midwinter? We should be so lucky.

SENSE OF FOREBODING

The term “winter of discontent” turns up every time there’s discord in the northern winter months.

It mainstreamed in the UK in May 1979, used by the Sun newspaper to characterise the acrimony and vast disruption between November 1978 and February 1979, when Britain was convulsed by bitter private sector and public service union strikes.

That resistance wasn’t, as one might think, against a heartless Tory government. Labour was in power and trying to control wages and inflation in the long aftermath of the wars and economic crises of the 1970s.

The aftermath ushered in more than a decade of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

The Iron Lady nursed a deep devotion to saints of neo-liberalist economics like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. These guys are also beloved of the US Republican Party.

Their ideas effectively overturned the economic and social consensus that had held since World War II.

One can’t say that Donald Trump is the most blatant exponent of that economic ultra-liberalism but he has been a major beneficiary.

So too have his very wealthy backers, whether public or highly secretive.

If words mean what they seem, he intends to overturn the geopolitical and financial consensus that has, however shakily, held since the end of that war, for example by reneging on the US commitments to the United Nations and NATO.

Trump’s also keen on walls and tariffs to serve US interests at the expense of others.

He’s a property dealer and he believes, above all, in the deal.

He figures that he can cut a deal with Putin and Netanyahu to stop their wars.

But it’s nothing to do with morality or war crimes, it’s entirely based on the notion of strong guys sorting out disorder.

Something is truly rotten, and deeply troubling, when you worry more about Trump’s glove puppeteers than about Trump himself. And about the deals he might cut with some of the most immoral and brutal warmongers going.

And so, even as our (so far) benign winter gently ushers us towards the solstice, there’s a palpable and entirely warranted sense of foreboding.

WAR OF THE ROSES

Now is the winter of our discontent is the opening line to Shakespeare’s Richard III.

It’s spoken by Richard, Duke of Gloucester. But he isn’t talking about England or the condition of the people, or anything else: he’s talking about himself.

He isn’t, he says, “shaped for sportive tricks”, nor does he have “love’s majesty to strut before a wanton ambling nymph.” And so, he determines “to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days.”He is thinking ahead. He has laid plots, he says – by “drunken prophecies, libels and dreams”, he seeks to set his brother Clarence and the king “In deadly hate the one against the other…”

As scripted by Shakespeare, Richard is a twister of truth, a poisoner of relationships, a conspirator, a practitioner of unscrupulous dark political arts. Sound familiar?

He sounds like a murderous Medici, a malicious Machiavelli or, perhaps, a medieval Musk or Donald Trump.

But Shakespeare was himself a propagandist for the Tudors, who displaced Richard’s line, and thus a peddler of dubious truths and rumours. And that sounds familiar too.

In real life, Richard III was actually regarded as a just king. And, when his remains were recovered from under a carpark in Leicester in 2022, it was discovered that he wasn’t as physically grotesque as Shakespeare had it. He had scoliosis, and that was it.

His end came at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, when his army was defeated by a force led by the future Henry VII, funded by the King of France.

This brought the Wars of the Roses to an end… for a while. But they returned with a vengeance in 2011 with the hugely successful US-made series Game Of Thrones, with which the modern world has more in common than you’d like to think.

Some fictions never die.

Some ideas never die either, for example that the right to rule never dies and is passed from parent to child.

That there’s a true faith and that a Messiah will appear to lead the faithful into paradise is another.

HOSTILE IDEOLOGIES

This myth is particularly strong in the Abrahamic religions that originated in the sands east of the Mediterranean.

Adherents of those religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have spilt oceans of blood to assert their primacy over the others.

Such barbarism, whether religious, political or dynastic, is driven by a paranoid belief that if you aren’t on my side, you are my enemy, which leads in turn to a fundamental(ist) belief that all heresy must be expunged by death and/or erasure.

Back in the USA, there are ominous signs that Trump’s MAGA movement has gathered all the trappings of a secular religion and an incipient monarchy – or dictatorship. What comes next?

To his disciples he’s a Messiah, foretold in the Bible, can do no wrong, even came back from electoral death. Many of them think “the end of days” is nigh.

They look like they’d follow him over a cliff. And it’s said that the jockeying in his family to be his anointed heir is intensifying.

MAGA is characterised by vitriol, intolerance, racism and constant threat of bloodshed.

No leader is above challenge. All ideas are contestable. Monarchy is the antithesis of democracy, where a leader is chosen by the citizens and authority derives from the citizens.

The whole point of democracy is that citizens participate as equals in the achievement of a workable polity, not that two hostile ideologies and their adherents go to war, each seeking to overpower the other.

That simply leads to endless surge and counter-surge, ad infinitum.

NO SENSE OF HUMOUR

It’s a particular paradox that the Orange Messiah’s movement is so strongly supported by American Christians of many kinds.

Well, this midwinter, as they gather at the river to proclaim their faith and celebrate their founder’s birth, they might usefully reflect on what the latter said in his sermon on the mount, in particular his focus on love and humility instead of force and mastery.

And what he said about an eye for an eye and the blessedness of peacemakers.

As for everyone else – well, they have to consider how to resist the tyranny that is to come.

Arise, arise and organise, said Joe Hill. And so it must be.

But let us also remember a small mercy: under the rules, he can only serve for four years. He may try to change that. But resistance won’t be futile if an extension of Trump-rule can be prevented.

Also, like Switzerland’s Operation Libero, let us keep, and deploy, a sense of humour, including sarcasm and satire. Medieval royalty maintained jokers to keep them grounded. This guy has no sense of humour, but everyone else can will benefit from a good laugh. It may be the best medicine possible – for now.

Merry Christmas

• The Hog