Instead of building a legacy in concrete things they actually achieved, our leaders instead now try to conjure one by setting a binding but remote aspiration and letting others work out the details.
We face an unprecedented number of ex-prime ministers trying to spin their legacies, and an unprecedented number of outlets in which they can do so. This will not be helpful.
The horror of what has happened is now widely recognised. The state, which should uphold child safety, instead engaged in a programme of mutilating children.
But Tory Democracy has triumphed for much of our history since Disraeli, and can before long be expected to triumph again.
Spoiler alert: it isn’t Lee Anderson.
Even May’s most ardent armchair critic would at least acknowledge she has enjoyed an Indian summer on the backbenches.
According to YouGov, the Party commands a plurality of voters only among the over 70s. As far as voting intention is concerned, the Conservative Party is literally dying on its feet.
In Gremlins Two, the loveable creatures are electrocuted into putrified jelly. The film bears no report that eleven survived.
The public is absolutely exhausted of politicians who are only prepared to offer half measures, and to see our country limp along in a stupor of inaction and failure.
The longer Number Ten fails to declare, the more cheerfully Labour will pile in – preparing to frame the Prime Minister as a bottler if he waits until after the Budget to rule out a May poll.
For whatever your view of him, the former star of our Moggcast is a House of Commons man through and through and, therefore, completely at ease operating as a backbencher, offering his view to anyone willing to listen.
Killing the Bill at Second Reading would have meant no opportunity for emergency press conferences and Star Chamber findings at Committee and Report.
We have become a party for whom the grotesque is the primary mode of communication. Just to reiterate, I’m not talking about policy or principle here, but a predilection for the odd and off-putting in presentation.
Each party has savaged the other’s efforts to tackle the problem with the same lazy attacks. Now the only common ground seems to be to kick the problem into more long grass.