Are we really contemplating another Bush-Clinton contest in 2016? I mean, Jeb Bush strikes me as a decent sort and, as I’ve written here before, Republicans badly need Hispanic support. But in a nation of 320 million, the law of averages suggests that there must be some capable candidates with a surname other than Bush or Clinton.

David Cameron may be distantly related to the Queen, but he is not the wife, son or brother of a previous prime minister. He grasped that his job was to prevent the producer-capture of the state machine and, by and large, he succeeded, cutting spending, slimming bureaucracy, rebalancing the economy back to the private sector. Result? The deficit has more than halved, Britain is the fastest-growing major Western country and — incredible as this sounds — more jobs have been created in the U.K. over the past four years than in the other 27 member states of the European Union put together.

That kind of shake-up, as a rule, comes only from leaders with an outsider’s perspective, like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Spend enough time in and around office and you lose your sense of “us” and “them” — or, rather, you start seeing “us” as the apparat and “them” as the general population.