The state, in a well-constituted polity, is a public entity, belonging to the public, in which public office is a public trust to be used for public ends, and where citizens in public life must be faithful stewards of the public good, for which they are responsible to the public.

The English Reformation unleashed such a weight of erudition, that, pretty quickly, it began to produce scholarship that invalidated some of its own wilder early claims, producing its own restrained Anglo version of the counter-reformation & thereby its 17th century greatness

This is a very dangerous bill. It gives the King (presumably acting on ministerial advice) the authority to remove any title, for any reason, without any kind of due process or procedural safeguard. We need much better constitutional thinking than this.

If my father were alive today, he would bear witness to the fact that I predicted this 25 years ago. I could tell then that Poland was going places, and we weren't.

A tyrant is often only the front-man of an oligarchy. His main part in the heist is to be the decoy. He says and does outrageous things to keep people distracted. Meanwhile, the looting and extraction go on unnoticed and unpunished.

So let's get this straight: people could go to university, get professional jobs, buy nice detached houses up in the hills, raise a family - and put them through uni too - and still have time for golf and martinis, and Boomers thought this was a problem? https://t.co/1SsrvzJvus

We made a mistake when we stopped teaching cultural literacy. They're graduating not knowing history, geography, film, the names & works of the great poets. Kids can't navigate the world if they don't know the things in it. Most books will be incomprehensible to them.

Today might be a good day to start reading this book. #Trafalgar

Cromwell tried, of course: 3/3

I wonder to what extent these procedures are transferable to secular contexts. Certainly, church and state borrowed each other's practices in pre-modern Europe. But today do these procedures only work within the bounded consensus of a shared religious identity and mission? 2/

The Roman Catholic Church (College of Cardinals), Salvation Army (High Council), and LDS church (Quorum of Twelve) seem to have solved one of the biggest historical challenges in politics: ensuring competent non-hereditary monarchic rule without destructive succession crises. 1/

A lot of people on the political right talk about repairing what is broken and restoring what has been lost in our civilisation. They are correct about the need for repair and restoration. They are barking mad to think xenophobic authoritarian populist oligarchy is going to help.

This is glorious. https://t.co/blGFel5NTC

It's the difference between complacent 'everything's fine' centrism, and 'everything's badly broken and needs to be fixed from the ground up, but the destructive extremes of left or right are not the way to fix it, so let's be sensible, moderate and pragmatic about it' centrism.

Imagine if Andy Burnham and Rory Stewart were to get together and create a party that would respond in a very practical way to the problems facing us, through the reconstruction of the state from the local level, avoiding the gesture politics of both left and right extremes.

I wish there were a serious Centre Party. Not dull, old, flabby, complacent centrism, but an ambitious centrism with a national reconstruction agenda focused on good government, public infrastructure, provincial economic development, constitutional reform, and powerful localism.

Imagine showing that picture to Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt, or even any sensible decent Republican from Gerald Ford to John McCain. Something has gone deeply wrong in America.

A good constitution should help keep the wicked, the corrupt, the immature, and the incompetent, out of office - or, if they get into office by some mistake, it should facilitate their swift removal. By this measure, the US Constitution has failed.

I love this kind of thing. There is a tendency to see constitutional polyarchies as a unique product of the English, Dutch, French and American resolutions. But systems of relatively inclusive, non-autocratic, rule do crop up in different contexts, at different times and places.

The oh-how-edgy Rad-Trads are on the rise: more vocal, more shameless, more uncompromising, than ever before. We need to push back against this reactionary tide with equal vigour. I recieved communion this morning from a priest who is a woman, and that was a greater blessing.

30. 'Conservative Critique of Liberal Political Obligations' by Daniel Pitt. I do not like to be unkind to a book, but this reedy tract is badly written, badly edited, badly typeset, and very weakly argued. Despite an interesting premise, I found it amateurish and unconvincing.