George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, clung for too long to his fair-weather formula about sharing the proceeds of non-existent growth.

ECONOMIST: Bagehot

Facing the republic's worst-ever economic crisis, will Germans show themselves fair-weather democrats?

ECONOMIST: The Federal Republic at 60

At the same time, Romney is a fair-weather friend of coal.

FORBES: Obama and Romney: Energizing Their Bases by Muddying Coal and Wind

But yes, some people who have been fair-weather friends, no doubt at those Krug and shepherd's pie parties, will steal away into the night.

BBC: Breakfast with Frost

If you hesitate before signing on to the idea of imported science, it could be because you are only a fair-weather believer in free trade.

FORBES: The Economics of Envy

Our plan was to take a six-day jaunt along the Har Ki Doon Trail, a 50-mile round-trip said to be ideally suited to the fair-weather trekker.

WSJ: Trekking the Har Ki Doon Trail in India's Himalayas

It has come to look rather like a fair-weather creed.

ECONOMIST: British politics

Mr Brown vigorously rejects one criticism that, these days, is sometimes aimed at New Labour, the pro-market social-democratic force of which, along with Tony Blair, his predecessor as prime minister, and Lord Mandelson, now the business secretary, he was a progenitor: that it was a fair-weather creed.

ECONOMIST: Britain��s prime minister