Whatever the outlook for the nascent government of national unity (GNU), what is perhaps not so obvious (or, for that matter, wholly predictable in its effects) is that our politics has changed for good, and none of the partners in it could hope to return to being their old selves. 

Remarkably, it is the rhetoric that may well prove decisive. Why that may be is suggested in British historian EP Thompson’s assessment of the dynamics of a very different time — the early 18th-century striving of disparate interests in checking the absolutism of the Stuarts. ..

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