I was shocked that so many people were supposedly surprised by Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency of the United States. When people asked me last Monday and Tuesday how I thought things would go I told them that it was too close to call and the vagaries of the Electoral College system made the outcome even harder to predict. I am not special: but it did not take a genius. What I am not is a member of the chattering classes. The surprise at Trump’s victory among the media was as much a result of wishful thinking and blindness amongst the chattering classes as anything else. The media on both sides of the Atlantic is now firmly in the grip of a surprisingly narrow section of the population. Hence the surprise at the Brexit vote. Most of the media these days have no idea how the average person lives or how they think. Its members are increasingly drawn from the ranks of the privileged. To me a good newspaper had a staff drawn from a wide range of backgrounds. Now the only diversity is in skin colour. But the privileged come in all skin colours; however, they all have pretty much the same prejudices. The time has come to look at more than colour of a person’s skin when hiring reporters.