All three PMs did about as well as anyone could in the circumstances, and all three, so far as one can see, are doomed.
A new volume of essays puts special advisers in historical context, and suggests the Cabinet has been marginalised by a succession of over-mighty PMs.
It is hard to find any precedent for the path that he has chosen. What furies drive him? Why this frantic activity?
We give you divorce reform, abortion law in Northern Ireland, citizenship rights for three million Hong Kongers, and the rainbow flag.
The big picture is that Johnson is dashing for growth. We devoutly hope it works but the precedents aren’t promising.
It may be necessary, given the Coronavirus, and could even work. But Britain has a long, long record of state spending failing to turbo-charge growth.
If Britain joined in a moment of self-doubt, it voted out as a confident, self-assured, optimistic, outward-looking and independent nation state.
This new government seems to want to concentrate its energies on giving Britain a cutting edge. Will it succeed where others have failed?
One has to pinch oneself to remember that as recently as last July May was Prime Minister, Hammond Chancellor of the Exchequer and Gauke Lord Chancellor.
I worked for both of them, and they were extraordinary human beings. But they were also both contingent, flawed, and also with their all-too-obvious blind spots.
How better to follow Jeremy Corbyn’s speech yesterday than by citing a signature Tory policy that shifted wealth to “working people and their families”?
Brexit has changed much for them, but less than one might think – at least when it comes to their strategic position at Westminster.
We regularly describe ourselves as a broad church – and correctly so. Any alignment with the Brexit Party would see that width of appeal narrowed.
No guilt attaches to Boris Johnson, unless by betraying the industry a second time he chooses to endorse and embrace that earlier guilt.