His appearance didn’t help. His trousers were a different shade from his jacket. The top button of his shirt was undone. From his pocket poked the lid of a pen. He looked like a lecturer who’d woken late, got dressed in the dark, then loosened his collar to recover from the mad panting dash to the bus stop. If he’d actually been a lecturer, of course, the air of absent-minded dishevelment might have been endearing. But he wasn’t a lecturer. He was the leader of a major political party. A man who claims that, five years from now, he wants to be prime minister.