Tom Crewe

The careers​ of politicians do not always end when they were supposed to. The Duke of Portland resigned as prime minister in 1783, only to have another, more successful go at governing 24 years later. Gladstone retired from the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1874 aged 65, but was leader and prime minister again by 1880, and quit his fourth premiership on a point of principle in 1894...

The creation of the British state was a municipal project, and the state is now being unmade by the collapse of that project. What we really mean when we say that austerity has slashed the state – it is a vital distinction, and not made nearly often enough – is that it has wrecked the ability of elected local authorities to provide and administer many of the features and functions of the state as we understand them. Without seeing austerity in these terms, we can’t properly appreciate what it has been attempting, and what it has achieved.

I’m not sure what characteristics are generally shared by the children of archbishops but I’m quite certain that the Bensons were unlike the children of anyone else. They were all prone to depression, to a greater or lesser extent, possessing what Arthur referred to as a ‘diseased self-consciousness’. They all – probably in reaction to their father – approached the world at an angle, preferring ‘a sort of casuistical, speculative, delicate, spectatorial criticism of life’. All of them wrote books. None married or had children, and they all preferred their own sex.

There is no reason why a plea to ‘do things differently’ couldn’t work: the gamble has been that the public are sufficiently disillusioned and dissatisfied with politics-as-usual (which they are) to vote for radical change (which they’ve already done once, in choosing to leave the EU). The problem is that while May and the Conservatives have looked at the post-New Labour landscape with clear eyes, the Corbynites have looked at it predominantly through the lens of Labour history.

About​ ten years ago, my great-uncle spent a month in a coma. Afterwards, the only thing he could remember was a dream – it wasn’t clear whether it had lasted the whole month or five minutes. In the dream he was travelling on a cruise ship crewed entirely by chimpanzees. Each morning the human passengers were gathered on the foredeck of the ship and one was selected by the chimp...