May it be

The news today that Theresa May is to become leader of the Conservative Party, and thereby the new Prime Minister, issomething about which I feel cautiously optimistic.

Mrs May has inherited a formidibly significant number of problems in the wake of the Europe Referendum  but she is clearly vastly preferable to all the other contenders who put themselves forward for the post.

I could be wrong but I sense she is a more mainstream Conservative than her recent predecessors - not libertarian and not wet. She appears to be, in the proper sense a " One Nation Tory " - the closest to the Macmillan tradition since the 1960s.

Her background as the daughter of an Anglo-Catholic vicar from the Chichester and Oxford dioceses suggests a good formation - and she is still with her husband a regular, unshowy, churchgoer. She clearly has a pretty stiff moral backbone, and as Home Secretary unafraid of standing up to the Police Federation.

It looks hopeful, though , of course, as Enoch Powell famously ponted out, all political careers end in failure. For the moment however we can hope.