Pity the Oscars. There they were thinking they were hogging the stage for sheer compelling screen time — the frocks! The gum-throwing! The big, shocking reveals! Jeff Bezos at

the after-parties! But we all knew different. The most outrageously compelling watch was the incendiary White House showdown between Ukraine’s President Zelensky and President Trump and his V-P JD Vance. Then it was over to Keir Starmer to provide a more muted spectacle — from accompanying him to his car to the supportive hand on his shoulder. It was all a riveting display, because it was for real.

Can we take it as read that most of us were watching between our fingers as the Trump and Vance versus Zelensky confrontation unfolded on Friday? It was partly the fact that it was two against one; partly that the Ukrainian president was shouted down; partly the failure to acknowledge that Ukraine had indeed been the victim of aggression; partly the sheer petulance of Vance’s pronouncement: “You never said thank you.”

Actually, Vance was the real disappointment: there we were — I can’t have been alone — thinking that the author of Hillbilly Elegy, the underdog made good, the thoughtful one, would have been an influence for restraint on the flammable president, and there he was, looking like the school bully’s best friend.

Many of us, then, will be inclined to think that it’s the Europeans who are the grown-ups in this debacle, trying their best to restrain the wayward, unpredictable, unhappily crucial US president, while Starmer and Emmanuel Macron cobble together some sort of framework for a deal that includes the Ukrainian president.

Thinking the unthinkable