Jeb Bush, you have a lot to answer for...

Damn those butterfly's wings!

Just imagine that way back when in Florida, the presidential candidate had NOT been the brother of the Floridan Senator. Do we suppose that things might have been fractionally different now?

If those few Republican voted had not made the difference in the presidential campaign, then would Britain now be facing a situation where a chunk of British Islamic youth is so radicalised that MI5 estimates that there are some 30 plots to commit major terrorist outrages on our shores? Would race relations have become so unutterably strained that a climate of fear exists where religious divides, almost unknown for decades, have once again become regular fodder on the evening news bulletins?

How would Al Gore have handled the fall-out of 9/11? Would he have brought the world to this terrifying impasse? If he had become engaged in Afghanistan, would he have carried on the pursuit of Osama bin Laden to the point of capture? Or would he have been distracted by the filial desire to avenge his father's defeat and invade Iraq, arguably at the time the most secular country in the Middle East, insisting that Saddam had links with the cabal of militant Islamic terrorist cells which is collectively known as Al Qaeda? Would relations between West and Middle East, between Christianity and Islam, between Sunni and Shia be as dangerously stretched as they now are.

I don't think so.

Jeb Bush, I think you have a lot to answer for.