Both of the recent fusses look likelier to expose hypocrisies than cause schisms, but you never know.

ECONOMIST: Conservatives and liberty

And if the tradition is also partly modern invention, nobody really fusses.

ECONOMIST: Celtic music

But this is also the chancellor who courts private financiers to build public infrastructure, who stuck to the Tories' tight spending plans in his first two years in office, and who fiddles and fusses with the tax and benefit systems to ensure money goes to the deserving, not the idle, poor.

ECONOMIST: Browned off with Blair?