Trying to prevent an election - A collective failure that was avoidable

In our least attractive national game — kicking the can down the road — there are strategies to buy time so hard decisions might be long-fingered.

In that grand opera of self-delusion, there are many ways to confound reforms that should have been introduced if not in the old gods’ time then certainly in the old governments’ time.

A commission of inquiry is, for those whose resistance to modernisation is under review, the gold standard.