Unpopular misconceptions

This is a man who has never learned the basic social skill of agreeing with people, making them feel good about themselves.

He is first and foremost a businessman and there’s an old saying in that game: you don’t go into business to be popular. Maybe not, but surely not many of us actually enjoy being disliked. Donald Trump doesn’t seem to care – in fact it sometimes seems he feels that he isn’t doing his job unless he’s upsetting, disappointing, alienating or offending someone.

It’s like a one-man siege mentality: nobody likes me, so I must be doing something right. Sir Alec Ferguson instilled that attitude into his wildly successful Manchester United teams, and Jose Mourinho went down the same route at Chelsea until he lost focus and alienated his own team and his support staff too, whereupon he was quickly removed from his previously impregnable position.

Whether the same will happen to Trump remains to be seen, but if it were to happen you can bet he would make it very damaging and highly unpleasant.

Some people have a simple knack of being popular, and whether this is due to natural charisma and an innate ability to do and say the right thing or the very different and less admirable implementation of public relations strategies in all aspects of their dealings with people, they tend to rise to prominence ahead of perhaps more deserving candidates who just don’t smile as much.

Politics is the most obvious field where popularity is a make-orbreak quality. It is clearly apparent in the result of the recent UK general election, which showed that Theresa May didn’t realize how disliked she was, nor how many people would rather be governed by the limp hand of Jeremy Corbyn and his bumbling sidekick Diane Abbott. Corbyn is popular with the public, but he’s not so highly regarded by his fellow MPs.

May apparently saw herself as the heir to Margaret Thatcher’s crown as the sort of woman who could sweep the crowds along with her through sheer force of personality, even if deep down they wouldn’t want to be married to her.

Well, now she knows, and the country is in a parlous state largely because of her.

As for Trinidad and Tobago, which currently comes down to Rowley versus Kamla – it’s a classic case of the opposition always shouting loudest. With the political parties here substantially split on a racial as well as a political basis, Persad-Bissessar’s lot are the aggrieved ones right now, and as popular as Dr Rowley might be within his own circles, he is suffering the fate of all successful politicians: being vilified by the competition.

If you ask around for the most unpopular person in TT , the name Peter Crouch comes up, because of the lanky former England footballer’s goal against the Soca Warriors in the 2006 World Cup, which was achieved by climbing all over defender and now Minister for Sport Brent Sancho. But sporting bad guys are like pantomime villains, and anyone who gets excessively worked up about such things obviously has never had anything really terrible happen in their life.

Top of the international “hate lists”, as the unpopularity polls are known because hate is a more powerful word, is usually someone like Adolf Hitler, with other notorious murderous leaders such as Stalin, Mussolini and Pol Pot thrown in.

And then, depending on who did the poll (or made it up off the top of their head) and where they live, you’ll get the facetious nominations of Justin Timberlake and assorted American celebrities you’ve never heard of.

Kanye West is probably the most unpopular global character who is, paradoxically, also one of the most adored and a high achiever in a field where the only measurement is the amount of money the public spends on someone’s work. And guess who West supported in the US presidential election. Yes, the man with the quiff and the surly demeanour.

Why would a spectacularly wealthy rapper whose music sells by the megaton hitch his wagon to the most controversial American politician there has ever been? Could it be that he sees something of himself in Trump? The subsequent climbdown in which he sought to distance himself from the Republican figurehead was surely at the insistence of his publicist and perhaps his lawyers.

Don’t rule out the possibility of Kanye West as a presidential candidate eventually — and that would mean (as things stand, anyway), a First Lady called Kardashian, who would sell the filming rights for the inauguration ceremony to Hello! magazine.