As the author GK Chesterton observed, if you leave a thing to itself, you are leaving it to wild and violent changes.
In America this week, David Cameron will see a Republican Party expending a great deal of time and energy deciding how, precisely, it will lose the presidential election in November. As fractious as the Tory tribe can be, it has nothing on the GOP in 2012 for splits, disaggregation and pointless introspection.
Nor has British party politics been infected thus far by the culture wars that have so disfigured American politics, or the “God gap” – the chasm between secular voters and those whose religion guides their electoral behaviour.
Last week’s Super Tuesday in the Republican presidential primaries failed to settle the nomination upon Mitt Romney’s patrician shoulders. And few sights in this uninspiring race have been more desperate or toe-curling than his flip-flopping struggle to win the votes of social conservatives. Whatever dilemmas and indignities lie ahead of Cameron in the 2015 general election campaign, he will not be forced to tap-dance on such issues of conscience.