The logic of commercial litigation is “do what you can get away with”. A senior partner once said, when I flagged a clause that was clearly not what the other side had asked for: “that’s for their lawyer to catch”. Fine, but we CAN’T have this adversarial model in government.

Adversarial processes are wonderful for pushing progress; they engage human inventiveness in ways that sameness of thinking doesn’t. In a legal system, it’s a decent methodology. But for governing, adversarial attitudes have to bend to a shared interest in the good of the people.

So for example, when there are checks and balances in place in government, they are not ‘the enemy’ of the government. They’re the road lane markings, the speed limits, the traffic control lights. If you think of every traffic light as your enemy, the road gets very dangerous.

When you “run a country like a business”, that’s the commercial litigation approach - getting away with what you can; pushing the envelope and waiting for the other side to push back, until you settle on a deal. But there’s no ‘other side’. Just the traffic lights.