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“... Left had become a Trojan Horse for the hard left wreckers. Then, as a member of Jim Callaghan’s Cabinet. I had become aware of the overbearing influence of the Trade Unions, culminating in the Winter of Discontent. As a member of the Shadow Cabinet, following Labour’s 1979 defeat, I had consistently ...”

“... not to say reactionary President of the Board of Trade. In 1951, he resigned from the Cabinet with Aneurin Bevan over the imposition of health charges and the armaments programme, was a Bevanite for a few years, but neatly stepped into Bevan’s shoes in the Shadow Cabinet when his former hero resigned over ...”

“... much evidence of political acrimony. Blair commended Peter Kyle, an upwardly mobile member of the shadow cabinet, for attending, given that being seen in Blair’s company is no way to get ahead in the Labour Party these days (what happens behind the scenes is another matter). But for Kyle, and for other attendees from the world of politics, it must have ...”

“... In the short run, Mrs Thatcher and the radical Right won the day. First they seized control of the Cabinet, in the autumn of 1981; and then, in the spring of 1982, conquered the opinion polls as the Argentines ran up the white flag at Port Stanley. So the Thatcherite counter-revolution was launched and the cycle of change had come full circle. It is never too ...”

“... of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the ...”

“... We laugh, but it is dragging us all down.  A long, sad, whispered conversation with a senior cabinet member who has decided not to contest the election, which means he will have to stand down come the reshuffle in a few weeks. ‘I’m in a job I love,’ he says, ‘but I can’t go on.’ He added: ‘Forcing Tony Blair out was the stupidest thing we ...”

“... at his house on the ‘wrong side of the Park’ and the fact that he used outside caterers for Shadow Cabinet dinners. He was rather dour and not particularly clubbable, though he was a fanatical bridge player, an excellent chess player, keen on tennis and golf, and the founding president of the Campaign for Real Smoking. Dubbed ‘Mr Smoke’ by Max ...”

“... of state for health and once the principal private secretary to Norman Tebbit. Like so many of his cabinet colleagues, and so many of those student politicians in the shadow cabinet, he appears to grasp the bullet points of an argument without ever grasping the argument. There’s a little moral seasoning to his dinner ...”

“... for middle-ranking jobs that required tenacity rather than flair. William Hague promoted her to shadow secretary of state for education, a high-profile position for a newcomer but also traditionally a department that the Tories felt suited a female touch. The fact that Thatcher had been there before her didn’t mean the Tory high command was thinking of ...”

“... SACP network, which still accounts for a majority of both the ANC’s national executive and its shadow cabinet, operates as a closed, masonic circle, blocking the access of non-Communist intellectuals to leading positions in the movement. The institution of an interim government will pose a delicate problem for the ANC-SACP alliance: it will accentuate ...”

“... the Spectator (until he was sacked), MP for Henley, Have I Got News For You host, fired from the shadow cabinet for having an affair and lying about it, mayor of London (and sponsor of crap projects: illegal water cannon, infernal Routemaster bus, illusory airport, insane Garden Bridge, entirely unused Thames cable car), elected MP again, big-money ...”

“... not just through generating enthusiasm at local level, but through producing such highly effective Cabinet Ministers as John Wheatley and Aneurin Bevan. It may be that that realignment, in slightly different form, is now with us. There is no need necessarily to lament the so-called two-party system: for long periods, including the inter-war years, it had ...”

“... clearly to the right of the most left-wing Labour leader since 1945’ wanted to join Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, and suggests that ‘personal aspiration’ might be the answer. Here she’s almost certainly right. After the failed Owen Smith coup in 2016, Starmer judged that MPs would not be able to remove Corbyn, and that the next Labour leader would ...”

“... on the centre ground of British politics,’ George Osborne, Cameron’s right-hand man and shadow chancellor, told the Times in September, ‘then thank you very much, Tony Blair.’ And, to borrow the Blair model, Cameron is still at the Bambi stage of development; his cardinal attributes are yet to be agreed on. Soft-featured, well fed, implacably ...”

“... books have, of course, deliberately jumped the gun on the moment, barely a year hence, when the Cabinet papers of 1964 will be released, but one suspects that second editions will be able to accommodate their revelations with the addition of an extra footnote or so. In the meantime one’s attention is commanded more by the authors’ key judgments than by ...”