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“... It’s unlikely that Sidney Webb features in Tony Blair’s pantheon of political heroes. It would, in fact, be difficult to think of a less likely match for Tony and Cherie than Sidney and Beatrice. Yet, after almost a century, the Webbs’ thinking about local government – their disdain for civic initiative and zeal for state uniformity – still appears to influence Labour Party policy ...”

“... with their problems . . . Oh, let me evade for a moment more. Campbell’s first book was The Blair Years. That was not a novel, but an account of being spin-doctor supreme in the government of Tony Blair. As Blair’s director of communications and strategy and then adviser, Campbell ...”

“... but liberty as the right to be cussedly, bloody-mindedly oneself. ‘John is John,’ as Tony Blair wryly murmured of John Prescott when he punched a demonstrator, suggests something of this tautological quality. This brand of liberty is not in principle opposed to authority, not least because without its minatory presence it would have nothing to grumble ...”

“... two sons, followed his brother, Leslie, to Eton, where he was a contemporary and friend of Eric Blair. In later life he was much irritated by questions from the compilers of the ‘Orwelliad’, as he called them, asking him for his impressions of a person who, as he pointed out, he had not by then seen for 77 years. This didn’t stop him from supplying ...”

“... from Work and Says Where’s My Supper? The Man Who Has Never Made a Bed in His Life’. Even Tony Blair (who grew up in an era when feminism should have had an influence, says Benn) knows where the washing machine is, but is not (Cherie once confessed) ‘intimate’ with it. Occasionally it appears as though Benn’s ...”

“... for the internationals. (Matrix Chambers took on the brief, and it was a short step, via Cherie Booth, from the verdict to a full conspiracy theory involving Tony Blair.) Years ago, in western Kosovo, I stumbled on a lone Albanian family, one of many who’d crept back to the ruins of a village destroyed a few ...”