Image: Whitehouse.gov
If you ever find yourself invited to have tea in the House of Lords you should accept. Without having to go on an odyssey you will share the experience of crossing the Styx. As you look up, figures from long lost newspapers flit past, wasted and barely recognizable, whose obituaries you assumed you had forgotten. “Is that… still alive.. ”.
Perhaps the shades of the past are especially attracted to the United Kingdom; maybe a zombie legislator had the idea, in the belief that the country attends to geriatric opinion like his own. At any rate if you opened a copy of the Times on Wednesday 20 April, you would have found yourself addressed by a special letter from George P Shultz, who was US treasury secretary under president Nixon from 1972-74, before most of the world’s existing population was alive. He was joined by Michael Blumenthal, treasury secretary under Jimmy Carter, and six slightly less antiquated one-time US treasury secretaries. Their eight-fold ex-wisdom mobilized to inform the British public of the need to keep the UK in the EU, as a springboard for American interests and all-round world stability.
