David Runciman

The template for this presidency is reality television. The lead character is playing a part that depends on his own words and actions and yet is entirely contrived. The drama is organised around a series of showdowns and confrontations when everything seems to be on the line and yet nothing is really at stake. Each episode ends with some people staying and others being sent home. This seems to matter enormously at the time and yet it is hard to remember from one week to the next why anyone cared. From one season to the next it is hard even to remember who the main players were, and sometimes the winners are the hardest of all to remember. Yet everyone knows whose show it is. And we can’t stop watching.

Was he sufficiently spooked? As the person at the eye of the storm, he does his level best not to let it get to him. From the outset he remains determined not to get dragged down by the craziness that surrounds his every move. This attitude plays to his strengths: his sangfroid is formidable and his refusal to be baited is admirable. But it is also frustrating – Rhodes feels it and by the end the reader feels it as well. It comes too close to that side of Obama’s personality that ends up with him shrugging his shoulders and walking away.

The evidence for the premise that international sport spreads peace and goodwill has always been fairly thin: every major tournament is dressed up that way but the legacy is more often mothballed stadiums and simmering resentment, as was the case after South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014. Rarely, though, has a regime so brazenly signalled its indifference to the niceties of international sport, which require at least the pretence that bad behaviour gets put on hold. As the saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and this is the currency in which Fifa likes to trade. But Putin isn’t having any of it. He seems to have treated the award of the tournament as a licence to try his luck.

The likeliest way to overturn the referendum result is to wait until one party or other has taken clear ownership of its consequences. For that to happen, Brexit has to happen too. It is possible that at some point a second referendum will be appropriate, once a new status quo has been established, to see whether people would prefer an alternative. Until then, however, conventional electoral politics will have to decide our collective fate. It makes sense to regret that the referendum happened in the first place. But there is nothing to be gained by regretting the result. No one takes responsibility that way.

It’s three weeks​ before Christmas and Los Angeles is in flames, though you wouldn’t know it from inside the bowels of the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Centre, where all is cool and grey. I am here with eight thousand other attendees of the Neural Information Processing Systems (Nips) conference – the great annual get-together of people who work in machine...