Concerning Journalistic Understanding

Britain's leading liberal newspaper appears to have suffered something of a primal scene over the personality of John Locke, the seventeenth-century philosopher credited with the paternity of liberalism. An interview has emerged in which Locke is described in unflattering terms, accused of laziness while a student at Oxford and of an inclination to "reel off, with great ceremony, some very common claims, and recite, pompously, some very trivial maxims" - a sin which must certainly come as a traumatic disillusionment at the Guardian. The shock can only be exacerbated by the fact that the source of the claims is both anonymous and uncorroborated, which in modern practice means that only the lack of a Blairite faction to the Enlightenment keeps it from absolute infallibility.