At times like this my mind wanders back to Michael Oakeshott, the greatest British political philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born over a century ago now, and lived until about the age of 90. An old friend of mine is writing his biography.

Oakeshott was a skeptical conservative, not a partisan. He usually voted for the Tories on the simple grounds they “they are likely to do less harm” than the Labor Party; but I can well imagine him voting, at times, for the Democrats here, if the Republicans posed a more immediate menace.

Oakeshott didn’t have a political program and never trusted those who did. His bête noire was what he called “rationalism in politics” (the phrase became the title of a book of his elegant essays) — the desire to use government for ends it could never achieve, at least not without sacrificing the good it might achieve. He described this as “making politics as the crow flies.”

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