A lesson for three embattled leaders: Like Obama, compete and prosper

MONDAY evening and it was off to an amateur production of The Glass Menagerie; strangely appropriate it seemed too in current circumstances.

Set in 1939, Tennessee Williams’s tale of a downwardly mobile Southern family’s struggles in Depression-era St Louis concludes with one of the most memorable soliloquies from the American theatre. It ends: “The world is lit by lightning.” In other words, war is on its way.

The world in 2008 isn’t heading for war — although governments’ attempts to distract their populations from economic woes will make it a more unstable place — but there is a lack of seriousness in political discourse at home, a reluctance to face up to the scale of the economic crisis if we are to avoid a prolonged downturn.