When the United States was ravaged by the tropical storm cycle El Niño back in 2002, one man was inundated with hate mail, obscene telephone calls and death threats. This was Al Nino, a market gardener near Bakersfield in California.

I spoke to him at the time and he told me that people kept ringing up shouting, in all seriousness, “Hey, you mutha, just cut out this storm shit, huh?” Al Nino was perplexed. “I tried to tell them it wasn’t me doing it, that the damage was the result of a global coupled-ocean atmosphere phenomenon, but they wouldn’t have it,” he said plaintively.

Al is sleeping easier these days; right now the deranged and deluded of the United States – that’s a fairly large proportion of the population – are busy ringing up plumbers called Joe. One plumber called Joe, in Amarillo, received 600 phone calls and an offer to buy his domain name for $350,000 (£202,000).

This is all a consequence of the final presidential debate between Senators Obama and McCain where a chap referred to as Joe the Plumber, whom Obama had met on the stump, was cited in almost every answer from the two candidates, as if he were the one vote who might decide this weird and transfixing election. Who is going to help Joe the most?

It’s entirely fitting, then, that the chap referred to as Joe the Plumber by both men is (a) not a licensed plumber and (b) not called Joe. His name is Sam Wurzelbacher and he has no professional plumbing certification. “Sam Wurzelbacher the Non-Plumber” has less of a ring to it, I suppose. Whoever he is, though, he is probably bad news for Senator Obama.

The polls seem to have it that Obama won the last debate, presumably by the expediency of appearing less malevolent than John McCain, who has this unfortunate thing going on with his mouth. He looks snippy and ill-tempered and his mouth snaps open and shut like one of those turtles they have in the brackish swamps and rivers of the Deep South that can shear off a man’s hand in one bite. Also, he doesn’t seem to have a neck and so needs to move his entire body when he wants to look the other way.

On such things are elections won, I suppose – won already, so far as most of the British media are concerned, which has been yearning for an Obama victory ever since the candidate first emerged with that terribly winning aw-gee-shucks self-deprecating smile as a possible challenger to the scary and bloodless Hillary Clinton. Me, too, for that matter. But I am not so sure that it is as cut and dried as it seems.

In my mind McCain won the last debate by some margin and while this might not matter too much, his repeated point about Sam the Non-Plumber may, in the two weeks ahead, have some resonance. Much of the American public do not like the notion of tax increases which will impinge upon the income they think they might be earning in years to come.

This was the problem with Sam, who does not earn anything like the $250,000 a year which would put him in Obama’s punitive tax bracket, but thinks it entirely likely that he will soon do so. A large number of aspirant but blue collar Americans think it highly probable that they will soon be living the American dream, no matter how fantastical this notion might be. They resent the idea that this hypothetical wealth of theirs might be hypothetically taxed. Obama’s redistributive instincts are not in tune with an electorally crucial tranche of the country.

And there is still the question of quasi-racism, especially in some of those bad-tempered, working-class Midwest states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. There are many millions of white Americans who would just love to see a black man elected president – but, y’know, maybe not this time around. Maybe later, some time. But not now. This contest is a long way from being over.

When I bought my first studio flat in London, my dad rang up to ask how I was settling in and whether I had a bed or not. “Well, not a bed but a futon,” I told him. “What the hell’s a futon?” he asked. “It’s a Japanese thing,” I replied, “a sort of wooden platform with a mattress.”

There was silence for a moment and then he said: “Rod, why don’t you live in the bloody real world?”

I was reminded of my dad’s entirely legitimate, if rhetorical, question when reading about John Prescott’s long-disguised loathing for Cherie Blair and her epic snobbery and apparent disdain for Prescott and his lovely wife Pauline. Well, they were invited over to the Blairs’ once and John asked what he should wear. Tony replied that he would be wearing chinos. “What the hell are chinos?” Prescott inquired.

Let me help. They were once part of the ubiquitous casual-but-smart uniform of utter and complete tossers. No worthwhile person has ever worn chinos. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela wouldn’t be seen dead in them. Chinos are, like futons, the mark of an arriviste idiot who needs a good kicking.

No need to ham it up, John

Somewhat harshly, John Sergeant was known during his time at the BBC as the Speaking Pig – a disrespectful title for the most acute political broadcaster of his generation. Now he has been reinvented as the Dancing Pig, dressed in Cuban heels for the BBC 1 show Strictly Come Dancing. Almost a pig in lipstick, then – maybe he’ll save that for the final. In the West End, meanwhile, the pouting moppet Kelly Brook has taken a serious role in the play Fat Pig to, er, “showcase more depth”. Go on, show us your depth, love. I suppose we’re all dissatisfied, like Kelly and John. Those with beauty wish to prove that they’re not morons; those with everything but, wish to become matinee idols. Good luck, John.

We’ll let you off, God – for now

An American court has decided that God cannot be sued, no matter how incompetent or negligent He may appear to be from time to time. Ernie Chambers, an Omaha senator, filed for a permanent injunction against the Almighty for causing “widespread death and destruction and terrorising millions upon millions of the earth’s inhabitants”.

The Nebraska court decided that God lay beyond its jurisdiction and maybe worried, too, about who exactly would enforce the injunction. Would it be required at some point to send the bailiffs in, or fit God with one of those electronic tagging devices and forbid Him to go anywhere near the Middle East? Still, God is not quite out of the woods just yet. Let’s just see how His rather nebulous and arrogant defence of “free will” stands up under health and safety legislation.

Maths fans: here’s a calculation to be worked on in the next few months. If Paul McCartney must pay his ex-wife Heather Mills more than £24m out of his £400m estate, simply for the unbridled pleasure of her company for four long years, how much should Madonna pay from her £227m estate to her soon-to-be exhusband Guy Ritchie – who was good enough to stick it out with the old bat for more than eight years?

In a fair world the answer would be about £40m, maybe plus a bonus for having to try to look entranced when she sang. My guess, though, is that he will get next to nothing and you might as well forget your calculations. He is a bloke.

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