prelude

That was a prelude to last week’s vote by council leaders - by a margin of 18 to 14 - to walk away from negotiations.

This was the prelude to his head-scratching assertion that he has “concepts of a plan” to reform healthcare in the U.S.

As a prelude to the bombing of an apartment complex just south of Beirut, beneath which Hezbollah kept its secret headquarters, Israel detonated booby-trapped pagers held by thousands of Hezbollah military higher-ups, then did the same with their walkie-talkies and followed up with airstrikes on weapons caches and other infrastructure targets.

But then the pager attacks occurred on 18 September, a prelude to a series of other strikes.

This looks an awful lot like a prelude to Johnson passing a straightforward, bipartisan funding bill in the end, now that he can prove that he had no other choice.