The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a pretty weird and peculiarly American concept. High-ranking members of the sitting administration, usually including the US President, put on their tuxedos, put aside their natural enmity and sit down to have dinner in a spirit of forced bonhomie with the Washington press corps.

Richard Nixon called the event “the worst of its type that I have ever attended” and described the attendees as “a drunken group, crude, and terribly cruel”. I don’t know what he expected from a collection of working journalists on a night off and with access to a free bar, but for 105 years, surviving wars, depressions, impeachments, scandals and Covid, the correspondents’ dinner has been an annual occasion in America’s political calendar.

Never before, however, has it been interrupted by a gunman attempting to enter the ballroom of the Washington Hilton, as it was on Friday night. Now, I am well aware that what I am about to discuss is not the most........

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