Quotations

'When I was 17, the schoolmaster tasked with overseeing my moral development frowned at my show of indecision about the future direction of my education and, as if letting me into a trade secret, carefully explained: “Look, clever people go to Cambridge, and pretty people: they go to Oxford.' 

John Maier, an Oxford undergraduate, in Unherd. That was true in my time. Oxford was glamorous, snob, High Church or Catholic, Tory and sexy. Both Oxford and Cambridge were well to the left of the country then in politics, but not the progressive indoctrination camps they are now.

'Cameron is much more right-wing than Boris and Rishi is much more right-wing than Cameron and yet they are perceived as wishy-washy by the right, who love Boris.' 

A "veteran Conservative" quoted in today's Sunday Telegraph. He's right, though Cameron is a Whig and much worse a Blairite, whose political hero is the very unconservative Garibaldi. He was horrified at Leavers in the Brexit campaign mentioning that Turkey would join the European Union one day, as he thought this was an Islamophobic dog whistle. Though very clever and eloquent he was too lightweight to be Prime Minister. He will be much more serious as Foreign Secretary than his predecessors after William Hague. He and Lord Hague,  you remember, destroyed Libya. He like Boris wanted to intervene in Syria but Ed Miliband and rebel Tory MPs prevented it. Still he can do better than anyone else available. He was in his first months as Prime Minister critical of Israel but then dropped this line.

'In the past four years, we have had six Home Secretaries (including Braverman twice), four Prime Ministers, and eight Housing Ministers; in the past seven years of great geopolitical danger, we have had seven Foreign Secretaries. At around a year, the lifespan of those holding the great offices of state is as evanescent as that of a caged hamster, and their labours just as futile. If every Government minister resigned today, and let the civil service run the country until Starmer’s formal assumption of power, nothing meaningful would change.

'But still the play drags on. In a desperate act of political necromancy, Sunak summoned Cameron from his lush Cotswolds exile to mark the end of the Conservative populist experiment. The Brexit referendum, which the former prime minister called and lost, was as much a rejection of his own record as of the distant European Union: of his underinvestment in infrastructure and demolition of state capacity, his failure to manage immigration, his reshaping of the British economy as a pliant provider of services to Chinese, Russian and Qatari capital, and of his misbegotten adventure in Libya still collapsing African states like dominoes to this day."

Aris Roussinos in Unherd. He writes so well, by which I mean good prose and acuity. He is right, obviously.