“The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a very big shift,” said David Blunkett, the British Home Secretary, in September 2003, “where rights were predominant but duties were secondary. There has to be a balance restored to the two.” The remark, by the cabinet minister responsible for police and prisons, among other things, can be seen in retrospect as a precursor to one last July by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to the effect that the 1960s-era “liberal and social consensus on law and order” had led to crime and social disorder. Blair was historically more precise but substantively more vague than his minister about what was the pernicious and socially destructive element in the 1960s “consensus,” but I fancy he would not have disagreed with Mr. Blunkett that it was the spirit of individualism which led people to put their own gratification above the good of others, or perhaps even of “society”—which Margaret Thatcher once famously said did not exist.

Last summer, a month after Mr. Blair’s aspersions against the 1960s and just under a year after his own paean to duty, Mr. Blunkett’s long-standing affair of the heart with a married woman was exposed in the British popular press. The woman, an American called Kimberly Fortier before the story blew up and Kimberly Quinn afterwards (when she belatedly decided to take her second husband’s name), was the publisher of the conservative weekly The Spectator. That publication might have been expected to show a certain