MOSCOW

“HE CANNOT KEEP his mouth shut; he draws attention to himself like shit draws flies; and he has a below zero embarrassment threshold. Donald Trump is unrecruitable.”

Colonel Igor Stalin, late of the Second Directorate of the KGB, has poured cold vodka on the notion that his organisation compromised and recruited Mr Trump in the 1980s.

“Spies are encouraged to be low key, quiet, unnoticed. They should blend in, be so ordinary that everyone accepts them. That was why Philby did so well in England, he was the perfect fit. Trump is a loose cannon. He is everything we would not want in an agent. And how do you compromise a man with absolutely no shame? His ego would need its own directorate just to manage him. We never had that many officers. I can only hope the CIA or Mossad managed to purchase his services. That would explain a lot.”