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“... of course, as it is now, but as it used to be in the good old days, before it was corrupted by Harold Wilson and infiltrated by the Militant Tendency. That Labour Party, after all, was the party most of us joined and went into politics to fight for: if it had survived, we would be in it still. It is tempting to assume that what is true of us must also ...”

“... fools and villains are the lifeblood of the paper. Every reader has a cherished bubble photo, from Wilson and Biafra through Kissinger in South Africa (HK to Vorster: ‘I’m only here for De Beers’) via James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, to Mugabe, Bush and Blair. For fans of a pensionable age, Verwoerd’s assassination (‘A Nation ...”

“... this and much else besides comes to a rather abrupt end on the morning of Tuesday, 16 March 1976. Harold Wilson, four times prime minister, an ambitious man who loved politics and was in the pink of health, able not only to endure but to enjoy the physical and mental strain of the highest office in the land, announced his resignation that morning. Not ...”

“... for Attlee’s succession. The Parliamentary Party split at the point of Bevan’s resignation. Harold Wilson and John Freeman resigned with him, but the division was kept within bounds by the need to sustain the Government until Labour’s defeat in the October 1951 General Election. After that, the conflict rapidly increased in momentum: the ...”

“... Labour administrations must make a ‘clean break’ with the opportunism and failure of the Wilson-Callaghan era. The new GLC hired numbers of these Bennites to encourage ‘popular activity’ in the interests of the dispossessed. It suddenly became clear that the vast rates which the GLC could levy without much damage to anyone could be used to assist ...”

“... Testament prophet from whom the more ambitious and modern-minded of his former supporters, like Wilson and Cross-man, were now anxious to distance themselves. It is a matter for argument whether by 1959 he was mellowing into a position of authority in the party: it took his death the following year to transform him into the maligned hero and inspiration of ...”

“... as ‘Mr Facing Both Ways’. Many Conservatives, including Churchill, uncompromisingly preferred Harold Macmillan to succeed Eden as Prime Minister and Leader of the Party. Some suspected that Butler had supported the pre-war appeasement policy, though, according to Dr Cosgrave, he tried to exculpate himself by observing that he had only been a junior ...”

“... and Rock Against Racism were for many people more important as politics than the parties led by Wilson and Callaghan, Heath and Thatcher. Sometimes he tells us just a little too much about the journey, how cloudy it was or how sunny, which mode of transport he used, what magazines he bought in W.H. Smith. But the point is well made when he writes: British ...”

“... them ‘desiccated calculating machines’. Attlee regarded theory as stuff and nonsense and Harold Wilson doused his food with HP Sauce to project a plain-man image. It was the people’s dominatrix who caused a turnaround. Pragmatic to the core, she took up philosophers she agreed with and allowed her instincts to be dignified as an ...”

“... politics in the 20th century: it is made up of Butskellites, including Macmillan, Callaghan, Wilson and Heath at one stage. It is that grouping that has presided over our decline.’ That remark unquestionably could have been made, and in those words, by Keith Joseph or any other product of a right-wing think-tank. The obsession with ‘decline’ and ...”

“... Education and the Post Office. These are modest enough functions which somebody has to carry out. Harold Wilson no doubt saw that he could stop that small hole in his administration to the Government’s advantage, not taking anyone from the Commons and adding to his nominal role someone who brought with him an aura of science, all the more needed ...”

“... Hailsham’ or just ‘Hailsham’. No one, after all, would dream of writing a biography of, say, Harold Wilson and calling it ‘Lord Wilson’ because deep down we know that was all a hollow sham. But Lewis clearly feels that Hogg is, well, lordly. In a sense this hits the nail on the head, and not just because he ...”

“... other. Without question, the most extraordinary thing in this book is the author’s report that Harold Wilson now says that ‘it never occurred to him that there would be any adverse reaction in the BBC’ to Lord Hill’s move from the Chairmanship of the ITA to the Chairmanship of the BBC: an event described by David Attenborough as like Rommel ...”

“... of grandeur about our post-imperial role in Asia and Africa’ which he discerned in Wilson. As Healey writes of the withdrawal from Aden: ‘All alternatives would have been worse.’ Over the British nuclear deterrent, Healey’s approach can be termed either brutally pragmatic or woefully disingenuous: either way, it did him no good in the ...”

“... which this implied, and I believe that Gaitskell was right in thinking that we should. When Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, he gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he never could quite believe that he had achieved the office: at least, that he never felt wholly secure in it. This would not have been true of Hugh Gaitskell. He would have ...”