Two men protest Marine Le Pen’s appearance on “The Andrew Marr Show” ©NEWZULU/See LI/NEWZULU/PA Images

More than a week has passed since that most surreal of mornings when many of us woke to find that the world was entirely different to the one in which we had gone to sleep. My initial shock at Donald Trump’s election has been slowly replaced by a kind of frozen comic detachment at its continuing awfulness. As if with each successive news item featuring Trump I’m being made to watch Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler” over and over again.

On that morning after, in the climate of barely contained hysteria that was characterising most media output, I was asked to write about the possibility of Marine Le Pen becoming the next president of France. I declined, but had I written it, I would have argued that thanks to the two rounds of the French electoral system and the strong likelihood of a republican pact against her in the second round, Le Pen’s chances are pretty slim. The editor would not have found this argument very sexy and in this day and age, who wants well-founded when you can have sexy?

The Sunday after, I watched the BBC’s revered Andrew Marr interviewing Marine Le Pen. He was widely criticised for having invited an extreme-right politician to appear on Remembrance