They never fail to disappoint you with their idiocy, do they? Who? People like me, that’s who.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll recognise it. You’re walking along the High Street and, possibly out of vain habit, or even in the forlorn hope that you’re going to see something better than last time, you glance at your reflection in a shop window.

Nope. He’s still there. Grey haired. Rather more portly than he should be. Slightly bemused expression. It’s a bloke in late middle age. There are plenty of us about and we seem to be in charge of the globe’s major institutions. I wrote about the worst of them a few weeks ago.

This week, they’ve come at us in their numbers – and none of them make any more sense the more we are exposed to them. Trump and Erdogan’s potential bromance blows hot and cold, but, hey, it’s not as if there’s going to be any serious fallout from any of this, is there? In Poland, Jaroslav Kaczynski’s unlovely Peace and Justice Party win an election, albeit not in the rampant fashion they had hoped, on the back of encouraging some good old-fashioned queer-bashing and a promise to appoint their own judges. Bulgaria’s football manager, Krasimir Balokov, brings all the obdurate certainty that he showed in his fierce playing days to his denial of the racist abuse against England’s black players on Monday.

When it came to Monday’s events, the doyens of the English press hoped they’d  shown themselves to be beacons of liberalism and open-mindedness that proves the exception to this gloomy picture of thoughtless bull-headedness. How proudly they stood behind the traduced figure of Raheem Sterling. You know. The guy who was slated by The Sun for having a tattoo on his leg and then had the temerity to suggest that black players were treated to constant dog-whistle racism from the British media – a claim backed up by a range of athletes from different sports. And just in case you’re wondering who writes about football in the press…….well, I’ll give you a clue. There aren’t many girls and only a few are people of colour.

And then we have the greatest bumblers of them all, the Barniers, Verhofstadts, Johnsons, Macrons and a bunch of jolly boys who like to call themselves the Spartans (and they really do need to take a look at themselves, taking on a name like that!) Alongside them, some big old units from the DUP – and, yes, I know their chief white man is a white woman – huff and puff and enjoy their odorous moments in the grimy, fading limelight. It is a measure of the utter contempt that I now feel for most of these people, that when I see them being dogged by a scruffy nutter bearing an imbecilic cardboard sign as they make their way to official vehicles, I can only sigh and observe that they have brought this upon themselves.

It may even be the case that as I tap away at this blog, some kind of Brexit ‘conclusion’ might have been reached. I’m almost past caring, because whatever happens, the next few years will demonstrate that anyone who thinks a clean break of any sort is going to take place needs to reacquaint themselves with reality. I’m no happy-clappy advocate of the EU, but it might just be a case of better the bureaucratic devil you know than the one you’re going to have to invent as the world’s traders line up to kick a chap when he’s down. Whatever happens, it’s difficult to draw the conclusion that carving out a place in a new world will be anything other than jobs for the boys – and that’d be the boys for whom an extra tenner on the shopping doesn’t register and who certainly aren’t sweating on whether Nissan or Honda pick up their ball and go home.

So where to look for our heroes? On Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, US correspondent Jon Sopel read out a letter from Trump to Erdogan and he had to emphasize that it was not a spoof (October 17th at about 7.50 if you need the laugh). This nasty piece of farce was then followed by a few moments from an audio diary from a woman voluntarily driving an ambulance on the Turkish border – the scene of the  fallout of all the boys and their prattle. At one point she was unable to describe the horror with which she had just been confronted. What she could have been thinking about the preening, sheltered blatherers can barely be imagined.

Her name is Tanya (or possibly Tania) Brown. Any amount of searching doesn’t reveal anything about her. And that tells you all you need to know. The old, well-fed white boys strut and fret their hours on the world’s stage and we know all about them.

The woman who clears up their shit remains anonymous.