Commentary 
One should not ask, said Bismarck, how sausages or politics are made.
This, of course, goes completely against the modern cult of transparency, supposedly the guarantor not only of clean government but also of democracy itself. If everything were transparent, nobody could do anything wrong (goes the theory), and our choices would be perfectly informed.
Alas, life is not quite so simple.
In Britain, the Conservative Party is in the process of choosing a new leader after the forced downfall of Boris Johnson. At one time the leader would have been chosen by haggling and maneuvering behind closed doors by the party elite, but in these days of openness and transparency, the membership must have its say—which, of course, is a far more democratic way of arranging things….