David Runciman

The​ speeches American presidents deliver on the day of their inauguration don’t make much of a difference to anything. A handful have given resonant phrases to the language (‘The better angels of our nature’, ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself’) but most are soon folded away and mothballed along with the event as a whole. Like the coronation oaths of medieval...

Unusually​ for a politician, Tony Blair is an authentic writer, in that he authentically sounds like himself. His post-prime-ministerial memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, was long, discursive, eccentric, a bit mystical, but also matey, self-confident, sometimes blunt, occasionally cheesy. It read like he’d written every word of it. The style of his new book, On Leadership...

Martin Wolf​ believes that capitalism and democracy are like an old married couple. Neither partner can cope alone. Without democratic checks and balances, capitalism grows greedy and corrupt: the people with money reward themselves with power, which they use to make more money. It takes politicians with a popular mandate to stop them. However, without capitalist get-up-and-go and economic...

All​ in all, this new government looks much more like a continuation of the first six years of post-New Labour Tory rule than the last six years of post-Brexit Tory rule. George Osborne’s political tactics are to the fore again. When Jeremy Hunt said that he would soon be announcing fiscal decisions of ‘eye-watering difficulty’ – spending cuts, tax rises, the works – he seemed almost to be relishing the masochism. Really his statement was designed to put Labour on the spot. Now that it’s clear there is no room for government generosity, what will Keir Starmer do? If he sticks to Hunt’s plans he loses his point as a politician. If he ditches them he risks destabilising the economy. This is pure Osbornomics, which was always just a continuation of politics by other means. There is, however, one glaring difference from 2010. Then, it was ostensibly Labour that had messed up the public finances. This time, the mess is entirely of the Tories’ making.

‘Do you know why British politics is so acrimonious?’ I heard one man in a dark blue suit and pale blue open-necked shirt say to another, dressed just the same. ‘Because the stakes are so low.’ This was a somewhat heretical thing to say at an event that had been convened to remind us that the stakes have never been higher. The occasion was the Future of Britain...