Two alliterative remarks offer the defining bookends for Harriet Miers’s brief period as a nominee for the US Supreme Court. Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said he was “disappointed, depressed and demoralised” by her nomination. Then two Senate judiciary committee leaders called her responses to their questionnaire “inadequate, incomplete and insulting”.

Taken together they sum up the twin forces that felled her nomination: opposition from conservative intellectuals and doubts about her qualifications within the Senate.