Across this week’s pieces on P&I, the same question keeps appearing: who or what restrains power when the powerful decide restraint is optional?

I’ve still got a week left in the Editor’s hotseat. And, ssshh, don’t tell Catriona, but I’m actually quite enjoying it.

Not the long hours, endless rolling deadlines, or the weight I feel for making sure P&I keeps doing what readers expect of it: publishing serious analysis on issues that matter. Not that.

But I am enjoying the chance to see the big picture of the website – the deep knowledge of our contributors, the things they care fiercely about, the passion and humour of the letters section, and the patterns that emerge across each week’s writing.

The pattern this week, to me at least, has been restraint.

Restraint doesn’t always sound like a wildly exciting thing. It can mean holding back from saying what’s really on your mind, or stopping yourself from doing something you might badly want to do. It can sound a bit boring. A bit procedural.

But in public life, restraint often takes the form of the institutions, laws and obligations that stop power becoming its own justification.

It looks like courts, environmental laws, democratic conventions, treaties and historical memory.

All of those things can seem pretty dry – until someone powerful........

© Pearls and Irritations