He claimed to be a dealmaker, a rich businessman who would chase out his country’s corrupt politicians and defeat foreign business interests. He hinted that the country’s leader secretly followed an alien religion. He barely had a campaign organisation, yet poor voters worried about their factory jobs flocked to him.

Stanis?aw Tymiński, Poland’s political sensation of 1990, was the proto-Trump of the television age. The other day I skyped him in Canada. An affable grey-haired 68-year-old, fiddling with his pipe in his home office, appeared on screen and agreed that Donald Trump’s campaign echoed his own.

“I follow him every day,” Tymiński told me. “I have one hour to drive to work and back, and I enjoy listening to Fox Radio. The US needs to be, sort of, repaired, and I think only a businessman can do it.”