The Dangers of Politics

From across the Atlantic, it seems that American presidents are gunned down, or at the very least shot at in anger, with steady regularity. None have been hit in my lifetime, but enough have been attacked in living memory for it to be a minor cliché of the office. By contrast, only one British prime minister has been assassinated — and it was over 200 years ago; and his name, Spencer Perceval, is remembered almost solely in light of that fact.