The United Kingdom has a new prime minister following an orderly general election. Let’s commend the outgoing one for honouring the peaceful transition of power and for playing a bad hand mostly well. Delaying the inevitable would have only invited another “spill” (leadership change via caucus revolt, as the Australians have it) and prolonged the stale status quo. Holding 121 seats is humbling but hardly a wipeout, à la Canada’s 1993 general election, the spectre of which more than a few on both sides of the pond invoked during the campaign. Besides, the outcome has had the added benefit of pruning the list of potential leadership candidates and that will be the key to renewal.

For all the post-election punditry, Robert Tombs’s retrospective on the past fourteen years of Conservative rule, in the Spectator, stands out as perhaps the most immediately thoughtful epilogue to the era.

Should he stay or should he go? Stuart Stevens makes a compelling case for staying the course in the Atlantic. On the other hand, as Lionel Shriver writes in the Spectator, that’s well beside the point (and you know it) and also deeply hypocritical. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein has gone ahead and answered everyone’s questions about the vice-president, in a podcast discussion with the last journalist to do a serious profile of her. Perhaps the most sobering commentary comes from a USA Today interview with Allan Lichtman “the historian who has correctly forecast the results of nine out of the 10 most recent presidential elections” using a set of key historical factors.

Overall, the Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessy reminds us that, whatever happens, we would do well to be less dramatic about the health of democracy. Ceding ground before it’s contested is a sign of weakness, just not institutional one.

Lastly, I remain suspicious about the “polarization thesis” and so it was a joy to read Karl Vick’s article in Time pulling at the threads of the consensus view:

So, yes, American politics has grown more divided—but largely among people who live and breathe politics. And these people exaggerate their own polarity to win the approval of other people who also live and breathe politics.

This is good news. Our political institutions are not broken. More, we’re at the movies, caught between talkers and shushers, trying to follow an increasingly complicated plot, with our already algorithmically-sapped attention span.