If walls could talk

In all my years assiduously watching The West Wing (and its repeats) I have singularly failed to see a single fly on the walls of the Oval Office.

Yes, I know that the Oval Office doesn’t have walls; being oval, it has one wall. But you get the point and if you don’t, allow me to remind you that life for a pedant can be harrowing and best left to masochists.

Of course, there is a lot of foliage on top of the Oval Office fireplace before which visiting leaders are usually photographed with the President. Perhaps a fly could hide there, though I hear that the Oval Office is continually swept for bugs, so perhaps not.

Anyway, if there is to be a fly on the wall of the Oval Office I would like to be that fly when President Donald J. Trump meets Prime Minister Jacinda K.L. Ardern. It will either be a highly stimulating meeting or the shortest on record.

Ms Ardern has said, “I'm looking forward to discussing a wide range of international and regional issues with President Trump, including our cooperation in the Pacific and the trade relationship between our countries.”

If anything is designed to send the President to sleep or to Twitter, that is it.

So, what else? I cannot think of anybody with less in common in terms of policy positions than these two.

In fact, they only have two options for discussing global issues: either argue about them or ignore them...and each other.

I mean, what they going to discuss? Climate Change? Gun control? Immigration? Trade sanctions against Iraq? Jacinda Ardern will afterwards say she raised all those issues with the President; he will smile benignly knowing that she did not. He will say, however, that he praised the Prime Minister on her handling of the “very very terrible” mosque shootings in her country and that he received an invitation by the Prime Minister to visit “Noo Zealand.”

Left unsaid, is Donald Trump would first have to ring this week’s secretary of state to find out where New Zealand is and that he is hosted by a prime minister who isn’t strong on geography either, having earlier thought she was in China when in fact she was in Japan.

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