America, during the year running up to an election, is for a European observer a most fascinating spectacle. The issues are the same: but the chance is enormously increased that they will become so heightened as to reach utterly surreal heights. I am now an addict of Fox News between 6 and 8pm, our time, when the wondrous Megyn Kelly presides over the most fascinating news show on television. She is relaxed, beautiful, intelligent, well-informed and funny. She is a former courtroom attorney with a mind like a razor. Forget Jeremy Paxman: this is real forensic interviewing, without the slightest element of Paxman’s unpleasant hectoring. And she has a wonderful sense of the absurd. But that’s not where I discovered the most absurd story of all so far (absurd but also deeply sinister): that was in The Times, yesterday: