How do we get from a risible political farce at a cattle fair in Macroom in 1992 to the possible next governor of California? It’s a wildly improbable journey but one that tells us a great deal about how democratic politics lost its marbles.

Our story begins on November 22nd, 1992, in that fine market town in Co Cork. Taoiseach Albert Reynolds is fighting for his political life in a general election. Fianna Fáil has done something extraordinary. The party whose founder used to look into his own heart to know what the Irish people are thinking has hired a 23-year-old Englishman called Stephen Hilton from Tory Party headquarters via the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to help mastermind its campaign.

This is, in retrospect, an illuminating moment. Fianna Fáil is, at the time, arguably the most successful political machine in the democratic world. But now it has decided that the future lies with spin – and that spin has no history and no geography. Politics is a set of techniques that can be applied anywhere at any time.

So Reynolds is up on the back of a lorry at a cattle fair in Macroom. Sean Duignan, the much-loved RTÉ correspondent who has become Reynolds’s press secretary, describes the scene in his diary: “A deputation of local farmers approach me and say they want to talk about ‘headage’. Insanely, I point them in the direction of Stephen [Hilton] who had just told me he had never been in Ireland (never mind Macroom) before. Charlie Bird and I can see them surrounding the poor hoor and still haranguing him five minutes later. The two of us rolling around like bold children.”

Irish sisters in Miami:........

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