When Donald Trump fired him after just eleven days as his director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci thought his career was over. He had become such an object of ridicule that a crisis PR adviser suggested he lie low for a few years before attempting to start again. Instead, the self-styled ‘front stabber’ from New York – who had naively assumed that a successful Wall Street career could equip him for the toxic political swamp of Washington, DC – launched himself into a round of media interviews, choosing to roll with the punches.

Fast-forward nine years and Scara-mucci is now a media personality in his own right, known in Britain as co-host of The Rest Is Politics: US, where he draws on those eleven days to opine on the chaos and corruption of the second Trump administration. With a successful podcast must, of course, come a book – and All the Wrong Moves is, like the man himself, lively and engaging and will not disappoint his fans. Part economic and political history, part memoir, part mea culpa for his early support for Trump, part manifesto to rescue American democracy and the rule of law from the President and his rapacious clan, it is above all a paean to the American dream: the idea that all Americans, if they work hard, can aspire to genuine prosperity for themselves and their children.

It is a dream that Scaramucci believes has died and he feels its passing personally. He grew up in a working-class family, the son of a Long Island crane operator who, thanks to trade union protections, was able to buy his own home. This provided the young Mooch with a