A STRANGE thing happens to California in June. Hot air from the Mojave Desert blows through the mountains and follows the Lycra-clad joggers and dog walkers to the beach.

When the air hits the Pacific, it cools and turns into a thick, gloomy fog. And so, for a few weeks in early summer, California does a surprisingly good impression of Blackpool in late winter.

The locals call it “June gloom”. Tourists shiver on Sunset Boulevard, comparing guide book pictures of palm trees and blue skies with the damp, grey reality. This year’s June gloom was worse than ever. From San Diego to San Francisco, there was a palpable sense of foreboding beneath the leaden skies.

But there is much more to the apprehension than the weather: California, whose nicknames all suggest abundant wealth — Land of Milk and Honey; El Dorado; or the Golden State — is paralysed by nearly $40 billion (£26 billion) of debt and on the brink of a spectacular bankruptcy.

Teachers are being asked to take unpaid time off; police officers are being made redundant despite a murder rate in South Central Los Angeles double that of Bogotá, the Colombian capital; and red electricity bills are piling up on the state’s doormat. Worse, no one will lend it any more money. On Wall Street, California’s credit rating makes Venezuela look blue-chip.

As if that were not enough, the Governor of California, a gaunt 61-year-old Democrat with the appropriate name of Gray Davis, looks likely to be catapulted out of office by a bizarre clause written into electoral law a century ago.

The clause, an unlikely attempt by California’s pioneers to mimic Switzerland’s Constitution, is brutally simple: any state official can be sacked by the electorate, it says, as long as 897,158 registered Californian voters — the reason for the number has long been forgotton — sign a petition in support of a “recall” ballot.

The clause also says that the cost of the ballot, estimated to be $30 million in today’s money, will be met by the state, or, given the present financial crisis, one of the state’s few remaining unfrozen overdrafts.

For Darrell Issa, a multimillionaire Lebanese Christian who fancies himself as a replacement for Mr Davis, collecting the signatures has proved to be as easy as opening his wallet. His tactics were simple: send out teams of signature gatherers to California’s suburban shopping centres and pay them 75 cents for every name they collect.

Mr Issa, 49, a Republican congressman, is expected to announce on July 4, Independence Day, that he has comfortably exceeded the 897,158 target. With his money behind the recall effort, few now doubt that it will go ahead. Absurdly, however, it was only five months ago that Mr Davis was re-elected by California voters, albeit by a margin as thin as a Visa card.

On the recall ballot, voters will be given a last chance to keep Mr Davis and also asked to pick a possible successor. Anyone with a US passport, a $3,500 deposit and the signatures of 65 nominees can be considered as a candidate.

“It will be the closest thing to political anarchy that any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” Dan Schnur, a Californian political consultant, told the San Jose Mercury News, suggesting that the ballot would look like a telephone directory.

For Mr Davis, the recall is not completely unexpected: he recently told a journalist who criticised his almost pathological fundraising that he never knew when a multimillionaire would try to buy him out of office. With his popularity at a miserable 20 per cent, the lowest of any governor since California started keeping records, his worst fear has come true. As American political pundits have repeatedly pointed out in recent weeks, a candidate who gets as little as 10 per cent of votes cast in the California recall election could end up running a state the size of Iraq with a population of 35 million and a $1.3 trillion economy. It is enough to make even Italian politics look dull and Westminster positively sleepy.

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