Tom Crewe

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.

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.

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...

It was impossible to disagree when someone pointed out that a year or so ago the idea of this many people sitting in a hall during a heatwave to discuss the Labour Party would have seemed fantastical.