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“... been possible over the imposition of a mere £23m of charges on dentures and glasses. Indeed, when Harold Wilson and John Freeman met with Bevan to discuss their collective resignation from the cabinet, Wilson kept saying: ‘It’s not enough, Nye. We have to broaden the issue. We can’t just resign over specs and false teeth.’ And so the issue was ...”

“... The split in the Labour Party over Europe was to be decisive. It led to the resignation of Roy Jenkins as Deputy Leader and to the breakdown of the old, controlling alliance on the centre-right of the party. The SDP, when it emerged ten years later, was the lineal descendant of the Labour rebellion. But dissent in the Conservative Party presented no ...”

“... grousemoor Tories, metropolitan eggheads, unofficial strikers, disbelievers in the Yorkshire sage Harold Wilson and all those too feckless to see the connection between muck and brass. Reading his reprinted stuff, which was mostly written out of a sort of turgid, inarticulate resentment rather than with real rage or outrage, one recalls the blustering world ...”

“... of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is clever, and will therefore lose the argument. And he reminds us that Mr Heseltine is ‘a blonde’. Johnson quotes his namesake, the good Doctor, on taking care to see ‘that the Whig dogs should not ...”

“... aspects of the British class system in which he had been raised. Yet he could never claim, like Harold Wilson or later John Major, to be a ‘classless’ political leader, and he had the good taste not to try. When he called himself a radical, it was not insincere, and many of his instincts set him against self-sustaining structures of power and ...”

“... him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close ...”

“... been insulted for their intellectual shortcomings. One (possibly apocryphal) story about Roy Jenkins illustrates the point. He’d been persuaded by a Welsh colleague to hobnob with some of the lads. ‘Buy ’em a drink, Roy. They’ll always remember your kindness and they’ll be flattered you sought them out.’ So ...”

“... votes being cast for Margaret Thatcher but might, even now, lead to their being switched to Roy Jenkins instead of Tony Benn. It is true that the record of an internal debate among the committed is not to be read as a prospectus for potential converts. But the cries of disappointment and betrayal, the denunciations of the media, ...”

“... also the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone through the motions of a renegotiation of Britain’s place in the European Economic Community and, with that token effort behind him, shepherded the forces of pragmatism to a resounding victory for remaining in the Common Market. The ...”

“... unsuccessfully to get a leg over’ Margaret Thatcher. He not only recites the well-known story of Harold Macmillan’s cuckolding by Robert Boothby but indulges himself in fascinated gossip about who then got Sara Macmillan (or Boothby) pregnant, driving her to alcoholism and an early death. Junor’s patron, Lord Beaverbrook, receives a full working-over. He ...”

“... politicians. Who exploits who? When it’s David Lloyd George, he exploits them. But when it’s Harold Wilson? 2 December 1997. Unable to attend Peter Hennessy’s public lecture on Blair’s version of prime-ministerial government, but he sends a copy. It confirms the impression that collective cabinet responsibility is as mythological as it was under ...”

“... actually risked his life on behalf of his country (Clem Attlee was another). Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson didn’t. It isn’t quite clear what Owen means to conclude from this peculiar passage. But most intelligent readers would assume that he is saying that we ought to be much more belligerent in our foreign policy because that is the way working ...”

“... sit well with a party which has always seen itself as a crusading organisation. And after that? Harold Wilson was the most successful Labour leader, winning four elections, but the recent spate of admiring biographies cannot rescue him from ignominy. The whole point of Wilsonism, after all, was to box and fox through the burning minute. It is hardly ...”

“... such white skins’; ‘Gentlemen never wear brown in London.’ (‘It is necessary to admit,’ Harold Nicolson wrote in his own fawning Curzon biography, ‘that it required several months of close association with Lord Curzon before even the most well-intentioned observer could wholly rid himself of a sense of unreality.’) Nothing is funnier than a noun ...”

“... 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime minister we have.’ 6. Harold Macmillan campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan ...”