“Malcolm Muggeridge captured this parting of the ways in a gloomy piece for Encounter: ‘Each time I return to England from abroad,’ he observed, ‘the country seems a little more run-down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier, its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier; the editorial pretensions of its newspapers a little emptier, and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.’29”