AFTER more than two weeks of drawn-out debate and all-night sittings in the House of Lords, all of which looked to the outside eye like a most un-Lordly filibuster, the coalition government has come to a compromise deal with the Labour opposition, paving the way for a referendum on a new voting system for Britain. This referendum, which is now on course to be held on May 5th at the same time as local elections, will be paired with a shrinking of the House of Commons from 650 to 600 members, and the redrawing of constituency boundaries to make them more equal in terms of voter numbers. To buy off the Labour rebels, the government has offered a speeded-up form of public appeal process for boundary changes and an agreement to review whether 600 MPs is the right number. The Conservative leader in the House of Lords, Lord Strathclyde, says the government is determined to avoid any drawn-out enquiries that would delay the boundary changes after October 2013, so that the new seats can be use...

AIR TRAVEL can be a succession of annoyances. Some are inherent to the business. Unless you fly in your own jet or in first class, economics dictates that you will be squashed into a seat that is a few inches too narrow and too close to the one in front to be anything resembling comfortable after three hours. Some of the annoyances can be understood, even if only at a stretch of the credulity. Having one's "junk" felt probably fits into that category: it is not impossible to imagine someone trying to sneak a weapon or bomb onto a plane, and to imagine such a person being caught by or, more likely, deterred by the prospect of being groped by a large person wearing blue gloves. Let's call these the plausible annoyances. Then there are the rules that are more annoying because the bar at which one has to suspend disbelief is raised even higher. One such might be the requirement to stash your earphones and switch off your iPod on take-off and landing. The logic is that you...

MY COLLEAGUE Babbage grapples with some truly enormous numbers in a recent post about changes to the Internet's addressing system, which is running short of unique identifiers to assign to the billions of devices that are now connected. The new system expands the list of possible internet addresses enormously, to 2128 (or about 1038 in slightly more familiar notation). Adjectives are utterly inadequate for conveying the scale of this number, but Babbage has a go nevertheless: Two raised to the 128th power is an astronomical number. In decimal terms, it is roughly 340 billion billion billion billionor, as Martin Levy of Hurricane Electric likes to say, more than four quadrillion addresses for every star in the observable universe. Astronomy has long been humanity's go-to subject when it comes to contemplating the truly enormous. But actually, if 2128 is so much more vast than the number of stars in the observable universe (1015 times more vast*, or 4,000,000,000,000,000 in long...

THE CRISIS in Egypt is keeping British newspapers busy this morning, with several tabloids sending reporters to Cairo to report the drama from the ground. This is how the main stories from Britain's best-selling dailies begin. Keen-eyed media studies graduates may detect a pattern: The Daily Mail: "British tourists..." The Sun: "Thirty thousand Brits..." The Mirror: "Britons were urged to flee..." The Daily Express: "Up to 30,000 Britons..." It is not just the opening lines. The Daily Mail's 28 paragraph story devotes 18 paragraphs to the "terrifying ordeal" endured by British tourists (not one of whom has been harmed to date), including the "mayhem" some had witnessed at Cairo airport, and an interview with a man whose flight was delayed for seven hours. Encouragingly, most of the front page of the Daily Star is devoted to a huge story headlined "Jordan 999 Dash Mystery". Alas, on closer inspection, it does ...

EGYPT is in open revolt against the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets this week, and many people have been hurt and killed in clashes between protesters and security forces. The end-game seems to be approaching rapidly, and multiple governments have announced travel advisories or promised to evacuate their citizens from Egypt. CNN reports that America and Turkey are planning to fly their citizens out , while the Washington Post has a fascinating story on Iraq'syes, Iraq's offer to return its citizens to the safety of Baghdad. (That's a weird sentence to write.) The UK foreign office, meanwhile, has advised British citizens not to travel to Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, or Suez. But they're also asking the estimated 30,000 British citizens already in Egypt to "stay put." So what should you do if you're already in country? The Atlantic's Jeff Goldberg has a suggestion : It is understandable that Americ...

MONDAY's suicide bombing attack on Domodedovo International Airport , outside Moscow, killed 35 people and injured more than 100. Aren't airports supposed to be safe from suicide bombers? Isn't that the point of invasive airport security? Unfortunately for the victims of the Domodedovo attack, airports aren't nearly as secure as many people believe. On the day of the attack,Wired's Spencer Ackerman explored what may have happened : [T]he terrorist[s?] who carried out the Domodedovo attack have demonstrated that its not necessary to get an explosive on board an airplane to kill and injure lots of people and throw air travel into turmoil. Thats important to consider as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security installs expensive and privacy-infringing "naked scanners" at airport security gates and keeps traveler liquids off of flights. Later, Mr Ackerman added this update: Reader PV, a frequent traveler through Moscows airports, writes: I have traveled quite ...

HOSNI MUBARAK has given a strangely defiant speech in which he asserted that Egypt's uprising would not have happened if he hadn't given the people so much freedom of expression, among other things. On a rhetorical level, I think I'd caution him against blaming too much freedom right about now. But this being the language blog, I noticed something slightly more technical: Mr Mubarak avoided Zine el-Abidine ben Ali of Tunisia's gambit of giving his speech in dialectal Arabic . (It should be noted briefly that nobody speaks the modern standard Arabic as a native language. Each region has a distinct dialect, really a modern language descended from Arabic roughly like Spanish from Latin. But the modern standard is still almost always the choice for formal occasions like political speeches.) That was the first time Mr ben Ali had done so. He was clearly reaching for a Tunisian nationalism and fellow-feeling in speaking like the people do in their homes and on the streets. It...

THOUGH it is not uncommon to find a small country with more than one official language, Singapore is still an unusual case. Among four official languages, Malay is the symbolic national language, English the working language, and Mandarin the language representing the islands ethnic Chinese, even though it is not the "mother tongue" for most. Clear? Add Tamil as the fourth official language, a range of Chinese languages and Singlish, the distinctive creole that blends elements of official languages along with a number of other tongues, and you have the recipe for a tasty linguistic soup. All the more interesting for existing in a country of fewer than 5m people once derided by a Taiwanese deputy foreign minister as "only as big as a piece of snot". As with many things Singaporean, language is an area that has been subject to tight government control. At the recent launch of his latest book, "Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going", Lee Kuan Yew, Singapores fi...

ALL the analysis of stockmarket prospects for 2011 focused on earnings, rate hikes, Republican control of the House, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the sustainability of the Chinese boom, high commodity prices etc etc I don't recall anyone (including your blogger) predicting that the market might be vulnerable to riots in Egypt. Yet that's why the market seems to be falling today, as investors fret that the Middle East might get embroiled in war again. Egypt was a reliable US ally and a non-threatening presence on Israel's border, but its government has long suppressed dissent. It would be nice to think that a democratic tide is sweeping the region but instead of several post-1989 Polands, we could get a few post-1979 Irans. Anyway, it's a timely reminder of the impossibility of stockmarket forecasting. My view tends to be that you look at long-term measures (like the cyclically-adjusted ratio or the dividend yield) and figure out that when valuations are high, fu...

A PIECE in this week's Economist looks at recent changes in the budget-airline market and the efforts carriers are making to pep up slowing growth rates. Ryanair, for example, is trying to make greater use of primary airports in order to "concentrate less on increasing traffic and more on extracting larger amounts of money from each passenger". And Air Berlin is also taking ideas from traditional airlines. Air Berlin now arranges its timetables to encourage transfers at its Berlin Tegel, Dsseldorf and Palma hubs, like a traditional network carrier. It also has a frequent-flyer programme. Through its Niki associate in Austria, the airline even offers a direct flight from Berlin to Dubai three times a week. It is discussing a co-operation deal with Emirates, so that passengers from the Gulf carrier can connect in Vienna to fly to other European cities. Air Berlin is also joining the oneworld alliance based around British Airways and American Airlines. Read the whole articl...

ALMOST exactly a year ago, I found myself reporting the fuss in Brussels about the failure of the Lisbon Strategy, the European Union's 10-year plan to make Europe "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment by 2010". All around me, Euro-pundits, Eurocrats and European parliamentarians chorused, as one, that the roots of the problem lay in process: national governments had ducked reform because the EU lacked the legal tools to make them reform. To use a technical term from political science, this seemed to me to be cobblers. The single biggest reason that Europe was not the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world, I argued, was that lots of Europeans (perhaps most) did not want to live in such a competitive place. For sure, they want to stay rich and comfortable, and they know that globalisat...

MANY years ago, when I was starting out in journalism, I used to know a much older, amiable hack, who after a drink or two in the pub at night had a bad habit of jabbing my chest, reaching into his breast pocket, and then thrusting a sheaf of crumpled, yellowing press cuttings under my nose to show that he was the first to have written this, diclosed that, etc, etc. He was, frankly, a bit of a bore, though a harmless one. Reader, I cannot help it. After so many years watching the Middle East, and watching the gripping drama unfolding in the Arab world now, I have at last become that man. It is too early to say whether the overthrow of Tunisia's strongman and the riots now sweeping through Egypt and numerous other Arab countries will amount to broad political change. But wouldn't it be nice, indeed thrilling, if America's secretary of state went to the University of Cairo, say, and made some simple statement like this: For 60 years my country, the United States, pursued stab...

IN BETWEEN thinking about the crisis of the euro and the fate of Belgium (this week's column ), I was asked by the European Union's Institute for Security Studies to offer some thoughts on one of my former obsessions: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These appear in the current issue of the institute's quarterly newsletter . I paste the piece below. For decades now, the diplomatic game in the Middle East has been summed up as: America plays, Europe pays. Now that President Barack Obama has given up on direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian leadership, largely because of Israels obsession with covering the ancient biblical landscape of the West Bank in concrete, might this be Europes moment to act? This was certainly the hope of 26 former European leaders and senior officials when they wrote a letter on 2 December 2010 calling on the EU to take a more active role in resolving the conflict and put its stated position into effect. Addressed to Herman Van Romp...

I WOULD draw your attention to a couple of letters in this week's Economist responding to an earlier article about aviation. One reader describes how he thinks a market could improve passengers' experiences in weather-related chaos. In your article Michael Levine suggested that airlines could bid for the right to be prioritised when airports reach full capacity. I would take this one step further. Instead, airlines could charge passengers for a warrant attached to their tickets that would carry senior or subordinate status. Those who have paid the premium for the senior warrant can jump the queue to claim a seat on the earliest flight once travel resumes, and those with a subordinate warrant would receive compensation for being bumped. The price of the warrants could be market-determined, and they could trade in a secondary market. Let passengers, not airlines, put a price on the value of their time. It's not unlike the idea for blind auctions put forward by Delta Air Li...

WHAT has happened to the language of diplomacy? It is reported in London that William Hague, Britain's foreign secretary, has been shocked by the poor spelling and jargon-infested English he finds in notes from his diplomats. Conservative commentators, such as Charles Moore of the Spectator, detect a broader slippage of good manners and education across the civil service. That may be soMr Moore, an unusually polite man by the standards of his tradeis shocked to learn that Labour ministers rarely sent letters of thanks after official visits, leaving younger civil servants at a loss when asked to draft such notes for their new, Conservative bosses. Friends of mine inside the Foreign Office concur with this gloomy assessment of their youngest colleagues, whothough bright and often expensively educatedstruggle to write English with clarity, let alone flair. I wonder if blaming the juniors is entirely fair. My experience is that even rather grand figures in the world of foreign policy ...

ECONOMISTS have recently been debating whether to adopt a code of ethics, to deal with widespread worries about conflicts of interest. But dubious behaviour has a long history in a profession that is, by its nature, a magnet to people who are preoccupied by money. David Warsh recounts one of Paul Samuelson's favourite stories about David Ricardo and the huge profits he reaped after the Battle of Waterloo: The bond trader had an observer stationed near the battle. Once the outcome was clear, he galloped quickly to where a packet ship was waiting. So Ricardo in London received the early news, and conveyed it to the British government. Then he went down to his customary chair at the Exchange and sold! Other traders, suspecting the worst, sold too, the prices of Treasuries tumbling, until at last, Ricardo reversed course and bought and bought and made a killing, his greatest coup ever, one that put even the Rothschild brothers in the shade. If not illegal, an ethical purist would h...

THE rise of new economic powers is inexorably bringing the rise of new intellectual powers, too. For decades American think-tanks have ruled the world. They have the finest facilities, the cleverest scholars and the best lunches. They have defined the terms of the global debate and provided America's hard power with a halo of soft power. This is still largely the case. But emerging-market think-tanks are growing rapidly, promising to broaden the global debate. The big ideas of the future are increasingly likely to come from them. Journalists, wanting a comment on China or an op-ed on the balance of power, may well phone up somebody in So Paulo rather than Washington (or they should do, anwyay, if they are up to their job). Every year the University of Pennsylvania provides a huge public service by compiling a list of the world's top think-tanks. America leads the world in absolute numbers, with 1816 think-tanks. It also leads the world in quality, with lots of American instit...

DUNCAN BANNATYNE, one of the businessmen-panellists on the BBC's "Dragons' Den" programme for budding entrepreneurs, is taking an interesting approach to PR for one of his own businesses, the Charlton House Spa Hotel in Somerset. Mr Bannatyne is angry with TripAdvisor for supposedly harming the livelihoods of hotels by failing to remove dishonest or malicious reviews from the site. His interest was piqued after a disparaging critique of Charlton House compared it to Fawlty Towers, a hotel of comedy fame. Mr Bannatyne does not take criticism lightly, viz the reaction to this complaint about an absence of vegetables. He could have quietly responded to the Fawlty Towers reviewafter all 35 of the 56 ratings of Charlton House on TripAdvisor are for five stars; another 12 are for four but instead has come out punching against the website , saying: TripAdvisor is a despicable and cowardly organisation, which is bullying small hotel owners all over the United Kingdom. In ...

IN A well-informed article in the Wall Street Journal Fred Siegel points out that, far from being part of the natural order of industrial society, public-sector unions were created by deliberate political decisions, as the Democratic Party saw a treasure trove of votes in organised public-sector workers. What was created by political will can also be undone by it: The turbulent years of the 1960s and '70s are best known by the headline-grabbing civil rights and women's rights movements. But there was another "rights" movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively. Liberals were once skeptical of public-sector unionism. In the 1930s, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia warned against it as an infri...

AT 3quarksdaily is a discussion on why we called Tim McVeigh a "terrorist", while the label is less often applied to Jared Loughner. Like McVeigh, Loughner targeted a symbol of government power, and hurt innocent people. Like McVeigh, Loughner had a complicated relationship with the military and, like McVeigh, he apparently had a deep mistrust of the United States government. Jared Loughner, like Timothy McVeigh, had reasons of his own, which are and always will be inaccessible to the rest of us. But we called McVeigh a terrorist. Why isnt Loughner a terrorist? Has America redefined its criteria for who can be one? A few plausible factors exist. One is the killer's apparent sanity: the more obvious the mental disturbance, the less likely the label "terrorist". Another is nakedly political: certain groups' members (Muslims, notably) have become associated with "terror" in so many minds that that label may jump more quickly to the fore. A vari...

SMALL rays of light can illuminate surprisingly large areas of darkness. The fuss continues to rumble on about the decision by Michael Gove, the education secretary, to publish revised school league tables showing how many pupils achieved a reasonable pass in five core subjects: English, maths, a foreign language, a science subject and either history or geography (a cluster of subjects that he is calling the English baccalaureate ). This marked a sudden switch away from a system in which schools reported how many pupils gained a reasonable pass (an A, B or C grade) in any five subjects. As my colleagues in the Britain section reported earlier this month , this transparency ambush has already achieved one desired and desirable effect: to expose how many schools were boosting their scores by pushing pupils into soft, often vocational subjects which counted for as much as a pass in maths. But it is now clear that the switch has achieved another win for transparency: exposing just how many...

THE decline in Britain's fourth quarter GDP of 0.5% was a nasty shock for the markets (in the US, that figure would have been reported as an annualised 2%) and a reminder that economists are pretty hopeless at forecasting. Often, the most startling numbers are revised on second estimaes - but it is hard to see how that can be turned into the expected 0.5% increase. It will be blamed on the snow in December but continental Europe was disrupted by snow too and it seems unlikely its figures will be as bad (just as high British inflation is blamed on commodity prices that the rest of Europe is also managing to cope with). Worth remembering too that this GDP decline occurred before the bulk of the austerity programme kicks in - the Keynesians (led by Labour's Ed Balls) will be citing this as evidence that you can't cut your way to growth. This is a classic St Augustine problem - we want a balanced budget but not now, just as the world wants to see the American current account de...

THERE are good reasons to debate what role minority languages should play in the countries where they are found. There are few reasons to be as snide about the question as Giles Tremlett was in the Guardian a few days ago , when Spain started allowing senators to debate in Basque, Valencian, Catalan and Galician: The upper chamber of Spain 's parliament has caused controversy by allowing senators to debate in five of the country's languages, with interpreters employed to turn their words into a tongue they all speak perfectly: Castilian Spanish. On goes the snide: "critics" are quoted, and a scathing editorial. Then comes a scene in which Hispanophone senators are "forced" to pick up their earpieces when a senator speaks Catalan, an estimate on how much it'll cost, and a peevish quote from the conservative opposition leader: "Something like this would not happen in any normal country." There then follows a fairly accurate description of the ...

INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES GROUP (IAG), the offspring of the merger between British Airways and Iberia, is officially operational from this morning and trading on the stock exchanges of London and Madrid. BA and Iberia will continue to function as separate brands, but IAG hopes the merger will enable it to squeeze out savings of 400m ($559m) per year within five years. Willie Walsh, the boss of BA, has become the chief executive of IAG. His comments earlier today highlighted the new company's expansive designs: "British Airways and Iberia are the first two airlines in IAG but they won't be the last. Our goal is for more airlinesbut, importantly, the right airlinesto join the group. Today is the first step towards creating a multinational multi-brand airline group." The same breathless desire to expand was a feature of Mr Walsh's pronouncements last year. So in case any CEOs of mid-sized airlines are in any doubt: IAG is coming for you. Kingfisher of India and Qantas...

AN INCREASE in business travel to a city doesn't always equal good news for that city's economy. Take New Orleans, for example. The city that Hurricane Katrina devastated in 2005 faced another major disaster in 2010, when the explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig caused over 200 million gallons of crude oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico. But Louisiana's state tourism industry has projected that the oil spill disaster will actually cause business travel to increase, somewhat offsetting a significant decrease in leisure travel. UPI has the numbers : [S]pending on leisure travel will fall by $691 million through 2013, but business travel, including by media, government officials and cleanup crews, will rise by about $395 million. The net cost of the spill to the state's travel sector will still be nearly $300 million through 2013, according to the tourism agency's report. But Louisiana's tourism industry is already so large that even a $691 million hit...

AN AIRPORT is a great place to write a blog post. If you're on a long layover or have a long wait for your flight, there's a lot of dead time that can be used to get work done. So that's what Gulliver is doing now. Why do I have so much time? I arrived at the airport way too early. Even the full-body scanners and other enhanced security measures here in Washington don't change the fact that Saturday is a slow travel day. Two hours early for a domestic flight is way, way too much if you're travelling on Saturday. It's probably too much even if you're leaving from LaGaurdia, O'Hare, or some other nightmare airport and planning to check bagseven then, there's a good chance you'll be waiting a while to board. Still, many Americans are determined to stick to the two-hour rule. "So much could go wrong," the argument goes. But many, if not most, of the time, nothing does go wrong. It only took me 20 minutes or so to get my boarding pass and ge...

WORDS fail. Nearly. Rush Limbaugh is very famous, very powerful and very rich, so I'm not going to let the king of American right-wing talk radio off for simply clowning. This is spectacularly dumb (make sure to get at least about 15 seconds in): Leave aside the gratuitous insult to a visiting head of state and an ancient culture; I would only blog this if I had a tiny shred of linguistic analysis to add. Mr Limbaugh's fake "Chinese" sounds a lot more like Cantonese to my somewhat untrained ear than it does the Mandarin Mr Jintao spoke in Washington. This is probably due to the fact that Cantonese is more familiar to Americans than Mandarin is, via immigration. And I'm also pretty certain I didn't miss the part where Mr Jintao started shouting like a maniac; his delivery was, if anything, exceedingly dry. It's not like a decent observer can't mimic Hu Jintao; Saturday Night Live does a pretty good job here. (And note that the butt of the joke is Americ...

I HAVE interviewed more than a dozen Tata executives over the past four days, and I am hungry for more. Western executives, and, I'm sad to say, particularly American ones, have become dreadful bores. They speak in management clichs (I feel like vomiting whenever I hear the phrase "walk the walk"). They are surrounded by plastic public-relations people who have managed to invent a language, PR-speak, that makes managementese sound like Shakespeare. Terrified of contradicting the company line, they all sing from the same dismal song-sheet. Indians, or at least the ones I've been talking to, could not be more different. They speak proper English (although "synergy" and "core competences" make the occasional appearance). They litter their conversations with references to mythology, Indian political heroes, stories from the Raj, the Cambridge wrangler system and much else beside. Far from singing from the corporate hymn-sheet, they seem to be genuinely...

THE European Union's plan to alter the terms of the ban on liquids in flight have not found favour with the European branch of Airports Council International (ACI), the association of airport operators. The overall ban is due to be lifted in April 2013, but from April 2011 liquids, aerosols and gels bought outside the EU will be allowed on EU-bound planes if they were purchased at an airport no more than 36 hours before the flight and are in a tamper-proof bag. However, ACI Europe is unimpressed, saying the timeline for the relaxing of the ban is "over-ambitious" with the available technology being "unfit for purpose". The ban on liquids over 100ml was introduced in 2006 after British police foiled a plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic using liquid explosives.

I STARTED the day on Tuesday by visiting Tata's steelworks in Jamshedpur. I found it awe-inspiring. The scale is mind-blowing: 2.5 hectares of industrial muscle. Even more mind-blowing is the steelmaking process itself: the giant cauldrons of molten steel, the huge trains shifting raw materials about, the fashioning of the molten steel into iron sheets. Three things struck me in particular. First, the relatively small number of people involved. Though based in a relatively poor company, this isa high-tech, high-skill, highly mechanised process. Second, the intelligence and enthusiasm of the people I talked to. These people love to talk about steel! And they love to recite war stories from their visits to other steel mills! (I apologise if I lost the plot every now and again). And third, the smoothness of the organisation. Every process seemed to be perfectly choreographed, and everybody seemed to know their role. Tata Steel has reduced its workforce from 78,000 in the mid-1990s to ...

FRENCH railway crossings bear an elegant warning sign: "Un train peut en cacher un autre", or "One train can conceal another." Today in the Westminster village, it is resignations that are thundering from left and right, with the resignation last night of Alan Johnson as Labour's shadow chancellor of the exchequer , followed today by Andy Coulson's (long overdue) departure as Downing Street head of communications . At the level of simple news management, the railway crossing analogy explains what is going on. It is a Friday, always a good day to smuggle out bad news (people have other things on their mind at the weekend). Mr Johnson's resignation was already competing for headline space with a fresh appearance by Tony Blair before Sir John Chilcot's Iraq war inquiry, this morning . The daily papers have a lot to say about Mr Johnson's replacement as shadow chancellor by Ed Balls, a former right hand man to Gordon Brown and a ferocious political s...

I HAVE already admitted to not being a "Word of the Day" kind of language person. Collecting rare and weird words has its fans, of course, but I'm a language-in-real-life kind of person for whom lexical esoterica is like memorising batting averages of long-forgotten players rather than having a beer and a hot dog at the ball game. (Read "memorising runs and wickets in long-ago Test matches rather than going to hear the sound of leather on willow" in cricketing countries.) So I was surprised when, in one of my first half-dozen searches on the new OED.com, I stumped English's most magnificent dictionary. (A free trial is available under username: trynewoed, password: trynewoed.) The word? Doula, a figure much discussed in my crunchy, progressive Brooklyn neighborhood. If you're passingly familiar with the birth-as-"experience" universe, you know that a "doula" is an experienced female non-doctor who helps women through labour, birth an...

DAVID Cameron has a very British guilty secret: beneath his bluff, plain-speaking exterior, he is a bit of an egghead. In truth, manyperhaps mostBritish MPs are rather geeky deep down, the kind of people who take pamphlets about welfare reform on their holidays. But in public, the most successful politicians steer clear of abstract ideas, preferring to talk about rolling up their sleeves, battling for Britain and so on. Today, the prime minister let his inner policy wonk rip. He was hosting a summit of eight Nordic and Baltic prime ministers in London, andin a departure from traditional summitrythe plan was to chew over ideas, comparing reforms and innovations in each country and seeing if any of the best could be borrowed by others. In the interests of full disclosure, Bagehot should admit that he was asked to be one of five facilitators at the summit, which is a fancy way of saying he moderated a bunch of the hour long policy discussions, which were otherwise closed to the press. Par...