“‘What is it that I don’t know?’ Sir Humphrey feigned ignorance. ‘Minister,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what you don’t know. It could be almost anything.’”

A Jim Hacker diary entry in Yes Minister Vol. I

In a piece in C2C Journal that I forgot to post at the time, I argue that social licence sounds good, or did until we discovered you couldn’t get one. But in fact it’s just another way of saying “tyranny of the majority” which is bad in principle and worse in practice because it means mob rule by a fanatical minority

“Study history, study history – in history lie all the secrets of statecraft.”

Winston Churchill to the author, then an 18-year-old exchange student (in the receiving line at the May 1953 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association), quoted in James C. Humes Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Statecraft

“Frederick Myers describes a conversation with her [George Eliot] in which, ‘taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she pronounced, with a terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how incredible the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’…. It is quite normal now for people to go through life without an ultimate object, but to the Victorians it was new and daunting. No wonder so many of them were such odd fish – Kitchener, Rosebery, Salisbury, Dilke, Curzon, Carson, Randolph Churchill, Fisher, Rhodes, Milner. In many cases certitude was replaced by a streak of violence…”

Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say if Theresa May’s record 432-202 thumping over Brexit, the most important political issue not just of her Prime Ministership but of this generation in Britain, is not a loss of confidence forcing her resignation, then the British Constitution as we have known it for at least 250 years no longer exists.