The British political class is not up to the job

IT HAS been impossible to watch the general election without being haunted by a single question-cum-exclamation: surely Britain can do better than this? The best performer in the campaign, Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, is a 68-year-old crypto-communist who has never run anything except his own mouth. Theresa May, the Tory leader, tried to make the election all about herself and then demonstrated that there wasn’t much of a self to make it about. As for Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrats’ leader, he looked more like a schoolboy playing the part of a politician in an end-of-term play than a potential prime minister.

Complaining about the quality of your leaders is an ancient tradition: Gladstone’s older contemporaries no doubt moaned that he wasn’t a patch on Pitt the Elder. George Osborne, a former Tory chancellor, has had an enjoyable election skewering Mrs May from the editor’s chair at the Evening Standard, a London newspaper. But only four years ago...