me seeing John McCain wander off into the red-light district of Hanoi in 1996 when he was there to normalise relations with the Vietnamese", and that "a few reporters told me the McCains don't really live together anymore, and that until the campaign Cindy McCain spent much of her time in San Diego with their daughter, because her husband was just not Johnny-on-the-spot anymore."

McCain certainly has nothing of consequence to say on the issue most disturbing Americans, viz that they cannot afford the fuel needed to drive to work and what jobs haven't already been outsourced to China or India are fast disappearing. 'Home' means a refrigerator depleted by soaring food prices, children facing a lifetime of debt peonage for their student loans and a mortgage with variable interest rates suddenly ballooning to 13.5 per cent.

Every candidate has some sort of problem. McCain has his legendary temper, rendering him probably the most unstable candidate in American history to be one election away from the White House. Obama has the

Rev Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and a Chicago realtor called Tony Rezko now on trial. There could be some unexploded bombs there, not least Rezko's financial relationship with the extremely rich UK-based Iraqi, Nadhmi Auchi.

Hillary has her ball and chain in the form of her husband. Bill has continued to jam his foot in his mouth on an almost daily basis, culminating in a tortured effort yesterday to claim it was Obama, not him, who had played the race card in South Carolina.

After delivering himself of this strange judgement he sought to reaffirm his credentials as a friend of blacks by declaring that he had established an office in Harlem.

On that reasoning, the investment bank Dawnay Day Group, which bought 47 buildings and 1,137 homes in East Harlem in March for £250m, should run for the Nobel Peace Prize.

He also claimed that if the primaries had been run under Republican rules, Hillary would already be the nominee. But then, Bill always liked working with Republicans.