The best quote from last week has to belong to the anonymous former minister cited in Katy Balls’s Spectator feature on the UK prime minister’s surprise election call:

How are we supposed to trust No. 10’s judgement when no one in the group even knows what an umbrella is?

Do not let your boss make a potentially career-ending announcement alone in the pouring rain—never mind what you think of him. The electorate know an omen when they see one. Over in the Economist, Bagehot reviews the prime minister’s penchant for making similarly, say, unique, decisions.

Keeping with the decision-making theme, but moving back home, Andrew Lawton joined Paul Wells for a podcast chat about the subject of his forthcoming book, the man who wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, and it convinced me that this is the only competency we should be focused on going into our own election.

Speaking of lost focus, let us admire Adam Gopnik for his persistent defence of liberalism (here, once again, in his latest New Yorker piece):

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that "share values"—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman's axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently.

When whatever alternative we’re currently flirting with ends in ruin, it will be necessary to reinvent liberalism—less, though, from scratch, for his effort.