Mr Panetta is also a calming, consensual figure who will go about his work without frightening the horses too much.
Mr Gul, who helped to found the AK party with Mr Erdogan, is widely seen as a more consensual figure.Mr Erdogan still has formidable support, with some polls putting AK on 40% of the vote.
Mr Netanyahu and Mr Barak decided to drop Mr Galant and replace him with the more consensual figure of Mr Gantz, who had been deputy chief of the IDF until his retirement in November.Other controversies surrounding the appointment of a new chief of staff have been gleefully reported in the local press.
It is important to note that 2C is not a consensual figure.
Insiders suggest the Queen Mother, who died in 2002, was much more of an admirer of the Conservative Prime Minister's politics than the Queen, a more consensual and centrist figure by instinct.
But the effect was merely to split the shrinking socialist vote, hastening the resignation of Mr Miller in May and his replacement by Marek Belka, a more consensual and technocratic figure.Some think that Poland's well-regarded president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, may hope to lead a big new centre-left party when he steps down in September.
That does not mean that we always have a right to pry into the consensual love lives of public figures.
Is he (see Lord Woolf) a role model, therefore a public figure, therefore someone whose consensual couplings are every bit as legitimate a story as anything he does on the pitch?
"Michael Gove's gone from being consensual to an ideological zealot," one senior figure says.
Before the 1979 Islamic revolution, back in the years when I worked as a judge in Iran, consensual sexual relations between adults did not figure in the country's criminal code.
