Search Results

“... lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast list. The Parliamentary Labour Party made the right choice in plumping for Callaghan over the initial favourite, Healey, and the surprise early front-runner, ...”

“... Perfect examples of what this sort of thing leads to were provided by the missions to Moscow of Michael Foot and later of Neil Kinnock. The Kremlin’s defence specialists, accustomed to Bundestag deputies able to discuss throw-weights, Mirving, telemetry and so forth, discovered that the British MPs, for all their passionate dedication to ...”

“... But I do not know that this connection did A.J.P. Taylor very much good – any more than it did Michael Foot, Harold Nicolson, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, Tom Driberg or any of the other literati who seem to have lost a dimension in the service of that heterogeneous collection of unlikeable lost causes that Beaverbrook picked up. Taylor wrote that the ...”

“... to become the saviour of his country. We have since been told, in the memoirs of Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver, that there was quite a lot of loose talk in the officers’ mess in those days, about taking Britain by the scruff of the neck and generally cleaning things up. The public face of this sinister idiocy was represented by blimpish figures of fun ...”

“... were warm, gentle, determined people, unlikely parents of a man who had been convicted of shooting Michael Gregsten dead in a lay-by off the A6, raping his girlfriend Valerie Storie and then shooting her, leaving her for dead before driving off in the couple’s car. Among the guests at the wake were Jean Justice, who told me he was a (rather elderly) law ...”

“... as the truth: their sole purpose, it has been said, is to answer the question ‘Howzat?’ Paul Foot’s question, who killed Carl Bridgewater? was not the question before the jury which in 1979 at Stafford convicted three men and a boy of shooting in cold blood a 13-year-old lad who had evidently stumbled on a burglary at Yew Tree Farm in Staffordshire in ...”

“... abuse went on for years in homes throughout the area. Jillings’s report was so devastating that Michael Beloff, a QC who specialises in libel, warned Clwyd Council not to publish it in case the council received some nasty libel writs. The council’s insurers also warned against publication. Indeed, they said that if the report was published and any of the ...”

“... recent Cabinet Ministers, only Ernest Bevin (two vols down, one to go) and Nye Bevan (canonised by Michael Foot) have received extended treatment, while the massive life of Churchill is unique in its Victorian dimensions. Today, the best way for a politician to guarantee this much-coveted form of life after death is to write it himself. And if he ...”

“... of post-Reform Bill politics is the quite unexpected emergence of a kind of radical Tory populism. Michael Foot is reported as saying of this welcome rediscovery: ‘To read the book is to be convinced as well as enraptured.’ It would be interesting to know what his present opponents might make of it. One way of writing a ‘political novel’ is to ...”

“... self-consciously intellectual’ politicians such as Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay and Michael Foot. Here is unmasked the latent snobbery of the anti-suburbans. The great merit of the garden suburb is that it brought order, grace and amenity to something that would have happened anyway. True enough, the centres of Letchworth and Hampstead ...”

“... in arguing that it should be turned back in order to save General Galtieri’s face. Even Michael Foot, however, was obliged to dismiss Mr Dalyell from his shadow ministerial post for forcing a division of the House on the Falklands issue on 20 May 1982. One Man’s Falklands is frankly polemical: it makes some valid criticisms but so overstates ...”

“... was an accommodating Old Etonian called Jim Shelley. Their commercial property manager was Michael Hutchings, a young eccentric known as ‘the man with the golden nose’ – a reference not only to his ability to sniff out a nice little earner in the property market, but also to his highly-developed taste for wine. Hutchings loved travel and his work ...”

“... Association a letter from the Solicitor-General to the selfsame Secretary of State for Defence (Michael Heseltine). Neither the Solicitor-General nor Heseltine knew of the leak. The letter, like the document about the Cruise missiles demo, was entirely secret. Though neither document was a threat to national security, both were plainly covered by the terms ...”

“... sacking them. We crept away, licked our wounds and determined never to forget. Halfway through Michael Crick’s magnificently rigorous biography of Jeffrey Archer, he deals with the story of the Toronto suits. All the main characters are here again – George Wool, Larry Park, Doug Hunt – all repeating what they’d been told about the man called Archer ...”

“... back into public ownership.’ The following year (1995) Labour’s conference spokesman was Michael Meacher, a fully paid up member of the Crystal Clear Faction. He concentrated on the speculators who were hovering over the battered corpse of the rail industry. ‘If there are any investors listening who are thinking of buying into our rail system, I ...”