Tom Peck's Sketch: Donald Trump debate wastes time debating what a waste of time it all is

No one can have found the viewing experience more unsettling than the Donald himself - if he was watching

Donald Trump’s attempt to reach out to the religious right backfired when he fluffed a Bible reference while talking at a Christian college on Monday (Reuters)

In 1905, when a large crowd of Russian peasants lined up behind a friendly priest in St Petersburg to peacefully hand in a petition to the Tsar, he wisely responded by opening fire on them.

The rise of the internet has made it frustratingly difficult to shoot people who sign petitions, but for reasons that remain unexplainable, it has also become fashionable to take them seriously. Because 574,000 people - of whom at least 400,000 declared themselves Jedi in the 2011 census - put their name to an online petition seeking to ‘block’ Donald Trump from entering the UK, our parliamentarians were formally obliged to discuss the idea.

The debate, it was almost unanimously agreed, was a waste of time. The sheer number of MPs who turned up to say it was a waste of time meant it went on for three whole hours. “Why are we giving him the publicity?” they asked, one after the other, all broadcast live on US public service TV, and none more famous than Keith Vaz.

It happened in a room off Westminster Hall ordinarily reserved for debates on whether jet fuel can melt steel beams. At least a hundred members of the public queued for hours in that cold and cavernous chamber, an ordeal normally rewarded with the rare treat of hurriedly walking past a dead monarch. No such luck this time, not least as in the end, only 32 seats were available, so to be able to say you were there, whispering ‘Who’s that?’ to your neighbour in front of a live audience of Arizona housewives watching on C-SPAN really will be one for the grandkids.

But no one can have found the viewing experience more unsettling than the Donald himself - if he was watching. The Donald knows that not everyone talks as straight as the Donald (even those who don’t refer to themselves in the third person), but even so, if you’re sitting down to watch people argue about banning you from their country, you don’t expect to end up with at least ten different invitations to visit.

“I would invite Donald Trump to have a curry with me in Bradford West,” said Labour’s Naz Shah. “He should come with me to the streets of Brixton,” said Paul Flynn.

“He should be grilled by Andrew Neil,” said someone else. “He should go on Have I Got News For You,” claimed another.

Why not? He should switch on the Christmas Lights on Oxford Street. He should be a judge on X Factor. He should go on the fourth plinth.

This was clever politics. They all know they don’t have the power to ban him, but pummel him with the threat of constituency visits with backbench MPs and he’ll never take the risk.

It’s not surprising, given The Donald’s various outrages against women and muslims, that it fell to the few female Muslims in Parliament to lead the attack against him.

“People say the public are apathetic about politics,” said Labour’s Tulip Siddiq. “This petition shows people will act to stop this poisonous, corrosive individual from entering this country.”

But it also shows that people will act to stop anyone at all from entering this country, given 450,000 people have also signed the online petition to “Stop all immigration and close the UK borders until ISIS is defeated”, as pointed out by the Conservative James Berry.

But Mr Berry was only one of many to prove that the £20m David Cameron had that morning promised to spend on stopping Muslim women being silenced by domineering men has not yet had an impact.

“Be careful about lowering ourselves into demagoguery in order to oppose demagogues,” said Sir Edward Leigh, before reminding of the red carpet that is regularly rolled out for “Chinese and Saudi Arabian leaders, and in the past, Nicolae Ceausescu. These are not people who talk about violence, they practise it on an extreme scale.”

But Naz Shah, who having defeated George Galloway in Bradford West, knows a bit about demagogues, put it best “I stand here a proud, British Muslim woman. Donald Trump would like me banned from America. But the Koran tell me: goodness is better than evil. If someone does bad you do good in return. I will not allow the rhetoric of badness into my heart. Hatred breeds hate. That is not something I tolerate.”

Wise words, and given they were dictated to the prophet Mohammed by Allah himself more than a thousand years before the invention of the toupee, we are sadly compelled to assume they apply to Donald Trump too.