For years, the reporting and commentary on international and British politics in the London Economist has been lucid, thoughtful, urbane and wryly detached. That spirit was hardly reflected on the cover, which, as with most British weeklies, merely offered some text and a partial table of contents. Nowadays the covers rank among the wittiest anywhere.
For its Christmas issue, the Economist portrayed Harold Wilson as a Santa Claus overjoyed because "I haven't got the sack." Other recent covers depicted Britain's "good and faithful" civil servants as so many goose eggs in bowler hats. To point up last week's summit meeting...