On reading the acid comment that “those who live by the sword die by the sword”, from Matthew 22:15, by an anonymous lawmaker on Boris Johnson’s withdrawal from the Tory’s leadership contest, I recalled the time when Tory prime minister Harold MacMillan (Earl of Stockton), following the Profumo/Christine Keeler scandal in the mid-1960s, wrought a wholesale Cabinet massacre. One of his Conservative MPs, if I am not mistaken, Norman St John Stevas, in his House of Commons speech, rather tongue in cheek, declared that “there is no greater love than that of friends giving up their lives for one man”: A sly inverted adaptation of John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

It looks as if history is repeating itself. But, then, “nothing is new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

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