So, as radio hosts over here say when they give you the stockmarket prices, let's do the numbers. At the time of writing, before results are in from Missouri, Puerto Rico and Illinois, Romney has 495 delegates, Santorum 234, Gingrich 142 and Paul 64. For Gingrich to get to the all-important number of 1,144 delegates to secure the nomination, therefore, he would need to win 44.4 per cent of the remaining 2,194 delegates to be elected, which considering that he is only polling in the upper twenties in his Deep South heartland makes it a virtual statistical impossibility. 

So why remain in the race, considering that he is suspected of hating Romney personally (a feeling that is fully reciprocated)? It's partly ego — anyone who runs for president of the US at all needs to have plenty of that. It's partly not to let down those numerically-challenged supporters who genuinely believe that he can win. It's partly because this race has already shown that weird things can happen: see the rise and fall of Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry for examples. But it's mainly ego.

There are perfectly good reasons for even moderate Republicans to worry that Romney might not make the ideal candidate in November. His remarks such as "I like being able to fire people", "Corporations are people too", "For an economy to thrive ... a lot of people ... will suffer", "I'm not concerned about the very poor" might be wrenched out of context, but as Enoch Powell pointed out, all quotation is out of context. A seasoned politician who has effectively been running for US president for more than eight years ought not to be still making such gaffes quite so regularly. Even assuming that these do represent his ardent belief in free-market capitalism, the campaign trail is not the right place to sound like Gordon Gekko. At a Nascar rally recently he admitted that the only people he knew in the sport were the team-owners, i.e. millionaires and billionaires.

Yet what the bloated American public sector desperately needs is precisely someone who does like to be able to fire people and understands that suffering on behalf of the many is indeed part of the solution. Romney's tenure at Bain Capital saw him invest $260 million in ten major deals that made nearly $3 billion. The annual return to investors was an unheard-of 88 per cent. If he were able to unleash a tiny smidgeon of that kind of business genius onto America's profit-and-loss account, and especially its balance sheet, he would become the greatest American President since Ronald Reagan. Yet the Republicans don't yet want to unleash him on the American people, for the simple reason that they are unsure of his attraction to working-class Americans. They do like Rick Santorum personally, but worry about his electability in vital Pennsylvania, where he lost his Senate seat in 2006 by a disastrous 18 points, his outrageous comment that JFK's speech on the separation of church and state — one of the cornerstones of the US constitution — made him "retch", and some old remarks that the Romney campaign has dug up in which he seemed to have cast doubt on evolution.