We are absurdly reluctant to talk about the policies needed to encourage the birth of more children.
The Ukrainian President transformed the atmosphere at Westminster, uniting past British heroes with the present heroes fighting to evict his country’s invaders.
Positive ideas of empire which in recent decades almost no one dared to express are emerging once more into public discourse.
The Scottish Secretary, understated in his public utterances, “often makes the wittiest interjections in Cabinet discussions”.
Or has PMQs become, like those wrestling bouts shown on the telly, a bit of a put-up job?
The friendliness and expertise of the IfG’s staff, and worthiness of its aims, should not obscure its desire to place the fate of ministers in the hands of mandarins.
But Sunak too wished to show the world he is not as other men, and in particular that today’s controversies occurred when Johnson was PM.
Should conservative parties pursue liberal-minded centrist support or compete against far-Right populists for working-class voters?
Two children watching the exchanges from the gallery did not get bored, so in that respect the pantomime had been a success.
The PM demonstrated his capacity for counter-attack, and neither Starmer nor Flynn managed to disconcert him.
But it is hard to see how he can become leader again in this Parliament, in which so many of his own MPs refused to serve under him.
Under Blair, the party rejected its own traditions and signed up instead to the global, liberal economic order.
The European Parliament is not a Parliament at all. Clarity never arrives. All is opaque, an endless subterranean wrestling match, for the irrelevant voters intolerably dull.