Theodore Dalrymple has returned to Law & Liberty with four articles thus far in December. The first of these articles focuses on the British Prime Minister’s unethical behavior attempting to save a corrupt supporter in Parliament.

However, our politicians do not emerge by spontaneous generation, like Venus emerging from the sea. They both shape and are shaped by the society in which they live, with which they have a relationship that I cannot but describe as dialectical. You cannot expect them to have virtues that are otherwise absent, or at any rate uncommon, in their society; and in the case of probity, once it starts to decline even as an ideal, its decline accelerates.