What is evident is that the relations between ministers and mandarins are at a crisis, in the strict medical sense of that word: that is to say, they are at a point at which they will either get better, or drastically worse.

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But in everything except the strict accounting sense of the word Mr Ashcroft has become a liability.

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Consequently, the study of corruption ought to include acts that may be legal in a strict narrow sense but where the rules of the game have been bent.

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But these are pretty much the only really testable subjects in a very strict sense.

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They would all represent, implicitly at least, an increment to the national debt (at least in an economic sense, if not in a strict public-accounting sense).

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