Burnham must slay the ghost of himself in 2022

REMEMBER the House of Cards trilogy - not the US version, in which Kevin Spacey portrayed a powerful President before being removed swiftly after allegations were made against him - but the original British version.

- Jonathan Arnott

Ian Richardson gave a masterful performance as Francis Urquhart, the stiff-upper-lip Chief Whip whose meteoric rise to the office of Prime Minister was helped on its way by dodgy dealings and the murder of a bright young journalist. Unbelievable as the plot might have seemed back in the 1990s, today such quantum shifts in the political landscape have become seemingly commonplace.

As Tim Minchin put it in Matilda, “Is it some modern miracle of calculus, that such frequent miracles don’t render each one un-miraculous? It seems that there are millions of these one-in-a-millions these days”.