Moving Day

CARL DE SOUZA / AFP/GETTY

One limo, two journeys. politics throws up all sorts of questions: about competing needs and interests, about motives and results, even about the sanity of its practitioners. But Tony Blair's handover of the British premiership to Gordon Brown, a transition long anticipated and heavily choreographed, unexpectedly raised the one kind of question that never finds its way onto a parliamentary order paper: a metaphysical poser. How can power — granted by voters, defined by laws, enjoyed and exercised for 10 years — slip away so easily, almost as if it had never existed? The question hovered above a grizzled Prime Minister...

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