The campaign and the party are taking a beating in the press right now. Pre-bituaries run on a near hourly basis. Things are certainly grim for the party, particularly when you look at the landscape from 30,000 feet.

Perhaps The Times could pioneer the concept of Prebituaries, by celebrating the lifetime achievements of notable people to mark their 65th birthdays? It would be a wonderful boost to their social life as they entered retirement. They could also read the bulk of their obituary at the breakfast table, rather than having to wait for the full text and then only being able to read it from their cloud using a powerful telescope.

You can tell something about a man by his library:
Bibles baseball bibliographies Pope Koufax Macintosh
Graves and Belzer Buber and Goebbels
chap books, for charity, and love
monographs biographs autographs photos and films—
a woodifice of an almanac, an organic headstone, a prebituary—