The world’s autocrats are united by “more than a liking for gold leaf”, says Paul Wood in The Spectator. Despite the bombast, they are often troubled characters, even “surprisingly weak at their core”. After Benito Mussolini had been shot and hung by his heels alongside his mistress, his long-suffering wife, Rachele, said: “My husband appeared to be a lion, but instead he was a rather sad and small man.” Donald Trump’s pathologies are well known, his character having been shaped by his bullying, “high-functioning sociopath” father. After he won the election last year, his insecurities ran rampant “even in his moment of triumph”. He posted on social media: “‘EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”

Vladimir Putin grew up as the “lonely child of parents traumatised by war”, with few toys at home, instead chasing rats to kill them for fun. He survived the Leningrad gopniki – “street hooligans” – despite being scrawny and weak, and became a modern tsar, photographed topless in the Russian wilderness, “wearing lifts in his heels to make him look taller”. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s horrible father once hung him from the ceiling by his wrists for swearing. “It was 15 to 20 minutes before an uncle cut him down.” As a small boy, he would calm his father’s rages by kissing his shoes. Xi Jinping fits the pattern, too: as the bookish and shy son of a senior party official arrested in the Cultural Revolution, he was paraded on stage at a “struggle session” wearing a metal dunce’s cap. His own mother was forced to raise her fist and chant “Down with Xi Jinping!” along with everyone else. Then he was sent to do hard labour at a school for delinquents. “Now he is the man who says he feels called by destiny to reunite China.”

The good news, says Michael Taylor on Substack, is that the world’s autocrats are “old men whose time is coming”. At 72, Putin is already on borrowed time in a country where male life expectancy is 67.7. Statistically, Trump already had his “big, beautiful life” – he’s an obese 78 in a country where the average man dies at 77.2. Erdogan, 71, has a little longer: Turkey’s male life expectancy is just under 75. And there may be a little life left in Xi Jinping, also 71. Average life expectancy for a Chinese man is 75.6.

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