Of all of the grifters and cranks to connect themselves to outgoing President Donald Trump’s touring circus, maybe the one with probably the most to lose — apart from Ben Carson — is Rudy Giuliani.

He might simply have gone down in historical past as an overzealous US lawyer who took on the mafia and patented the “perp stroll”, or as a fantastically overrated New York mayor, largely on account of the very fact he occurred to carry the workplace on September 11 2001, and gave the general public the hard-line response it needed.

Now, after two years as turning up as a crazed and incoherent defender of Trump throughout the media (and much more humiliatingly within the newest Borat film) Giuliani is a walking punchline. And he is studying what everybody who works with Trump finally learns — the president is petty, cannot regulate his feelings and would not pay his payments.