By Bagehot

SOME years ago, struck by an appeal from the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, for European Union policies to ensure that Europe could “continue to build aeroplanes, boats, trains and cars” (and, it should be admitted, influenced by my children’s then bedtime reading), your correspondent coined what I called the Richard Scarry rule of politics. This holds that all elected politicians hate getting on the wrong side of any economic sector that routinely appears in children’s books. The great Mr Scarry wrote of Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. Politicians, for their part, like to be seen in public as the friends of firemen, fishermen, farmers and teachers, and as builders of shiny airports, railway stations and schools.