Now that there is just a week to go until the election in America, the question I’m pondering today is, with Biden’s lead in the polls looking quite solid, can we start to hope that this time next week the nightmare will be over? Can we afford to start to breathe more easily, given that so many votes have been cast already by post and so will probably reflect opinion polls? Can we let ourselves imagine that the total embarrassment to human civilisation who Americans have called their president for the last four years might be on his way out of power? I really, really hope we can, yet if the last four years have taught us anything, it’s not to get our hopes up.