Boris Johnson stood on the Mall and bid a passionate farewell to the London Games. While I've seen American friends do it, this was the first speech by a politician that I've seen Brits post on Facebook. What was the difference? Well tone wins the day. Yes, Boris has a delicious mastery of the English language.
The UK's share of the 11 million 15-24 year olds who are unemployed across the OECD is 1 million. Greece and Spain fare worse with rates of over 50% of the total youth labour force, but the UK is fast catching up with the rest of Europe who have experienced high numbers of unemployment for quite some time.
This is a big deal - we are not only putting a truly vast sum of money at stake - the defence contractors estimate £25 billion, so we can assume at least three times that, 10 years late - we are also binding ourselves into a strategic commitment to maintaining not just a nuclear arsenal, but to a uniquely cold-war era one, based around submarine launched ballistic missiles.