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“... precedents are not promising. The most recent example of minority government at Westminster is John Major’s in 1996-97; before that there was the Wilson-Callaghan Labour administration of 1974-79 and Ramsay MacDonald’s of 1929-31. In each case, the government reeled from crisis to crisis, eventually limping into a ...”

“... which comes out too in his treatment of Blunt, Burgess, Driberg, and a civil servant called John Cairncross. All these geese become swans in Pincher’s skilled hands. How unfair to suggest that they were small fry, dilettanti, wartime temporary agents or upper-class decadents. Blunt, in particular, he praises as an agent of a supreme professionalism ...”

“... If Shakespeare co-wrote the first heading, the second was entirely Lamb’s own work: Jim Callaghan never spoke the words the caption so adroitly and damagingly gave the impression of attributing to him. Although one can’t quite accuse the Sun of having a hidden agenda, the political thinking behind all this wasn’t entirely as straightforward as ...”

“... which uses the Upper House as a clerk might use Tippex. The ‘sober second thought’ which Sir John Macdonald, the first Canadian premier (and a notable inebriate) attributed to senates is largely the stuff of legend. To see what lessons may be learned from abroad, Meg Russell has examined seven upper houses in modern democracies. Rather oddly, she omits ...”

“... appeal of the Labour Party, which should be blamed not only on the betrayals of Wilson and Callaghan but also on ‘a whole political orientation, namely social democracy and its will to manage a capitalist social order without ever seeking in practice to bring about a radical transformation of any of its basic features’. Miliband accepts it now as ...”

“... than a gentleman (one of his favourite distinctions), a competent professional of modern spirit. John Kennedy was already dead, but the New Frontier spirit seemed to be alive in the Britain of 1964, and Harold Wilson to exemplify it. We believed him, or some of us did, when he said that he would get Britain going again, bring in new people, harness new ...”

“... champagne and brandy . . . to incapacitate any lesser man’, as his private secretary John Colville put it. He would talk to ministers with Toby, his budgie, alighting (and sometimes doing more than that) on their heads. He had frequent sleeps. His method of dealing with crises, he explained, was to ‘turn out the light, say “bugger ...”

“... while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing Street after serving continuously since his appointment in 1964, while doubling up all the while as general secretary of the TUC. At any rate, it shows that there was already a mindset that deplored ...”

“... John Stuart Mill labelled the Conservatives ‘the stupid party’. They have certainly been stupid since 1997, and one wonders if their stupidity will persist. But a related and more interesting question is: ‘Are the Conservatives any longer a serious party?’ A serious party can be one of two things. It can, like the Greens, be concerned with only one issue or one group of issues ...”

“... James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a British representative at Strasbourg. But it is no surprise to me that in over twenty years as an ...”

“... or in the unions, like Ernest Bevin, or had a political standing, like Aneurin Bevan or James Callaghan, that made them to some extent proof against their leader’s displeasure. With the exception of Gordon Brown, and possibly John Prescott, no member of the present cabinet has such standing. Ministers have no power ...”

“... civil servants and the Opposition about the evils of socialism, likes to relax, as her confidant, John Vaizey, put it, by ‘exciting herself with books about the horrors of Marxism’. ‘At the moment I’m rereading The Fourth Protocol,’ she happily tells a journalist. Rereading. Jonathan Miller talks of her ‘catering to the worst elements of commuter ...”

“... of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in ...”

“... who is a working peer. The only leading official to whom the Prime Minister talks regularly is John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who shares something of his political approach and whom he usually sees discreetly, rather than for talks heralded by the TUC. Union leaders have had, perforce, to get used to a vastly diminished status – though none of ...”

“... irritated journalists on other newspapers. Part of the story he has to tell is how people like John Cole – yes, the same John Cole – and his successor as News Editor. Jean Stead, dragged the paper more or less reluctantly into mainstream, news-oriented journalism. Coming from what at the time was probably the most ...”