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“... was to make major headlines and be more than a support act for the clash of the Davids. With David Cameron boyishly – and buoyantly – installed in the middle of the opposition front bench, the time was at last ripe for overthrowing Kennedy. If the conspirators had waited too much longer, there was always the danger that they might have found coverage ...”

“... to be British. All state-funded institutions, of course. Shame, then, that it was Wills who wrote Gordon Brown’s keynote speech in which he promised not to put up income tax during Labour’s first term – a policy the party now hopes to continue for a second. R.I.P. progressive taxation. When, on the other hand, John Major thinks of Englishness, he thinks ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... This thinking gave rise to New Labour’s introduction of citizenship tests and ceremonies, and Gordon Brown’s infatuation with Britishness. (Cantle wrote of the need for ‘a meaningful concept of “citizenship”’ that would acknowledge ‘the contributions of all cultures’ but establish ‘a clear primary loyalty to this nation’.) Opposition to ...”

“... now, by extension, included. Subsequently, in a similar conversation with the Oxford sociologist Gordon Marshall, Gordon (who is as authentically Scottish as Alastair) describes watching the 1966 World Cup Final on a flickering black and white TV in a pub in a West Highland village. He was one of perhaps a dozen out of ...”

“... of lovers in the Islamic haadith, the Heroides of Ovid and the western courtly romances, and David Swale (all too briefly) discusses the limitations of D.H. Lawrence when read in the light of the German Bildungsroman, with its freedom and spiritual adventurousness which is at the same time related to the sense of a given community: these, however, are ...”

“... bequeathed to him by Kenneth Clarke, one of the best Chancellors of the Exchequer since the war, Gordon Brown managed a respectable if unspectacular rate of growth without inflation and did so, remarkably, without running into an economic crisis. Yet he was lucky. Until the last few months he was greatly aided by a benign economic climate in the West, and ...”

“... the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting ...”

“... wanted to be as formidable as Thatcher had been, a steely woman in a world of wobbly men. Even Gordon Brown, with his ceaseless personal ambition, believed that politicians only get a few chances to make a lasting difference and he longed to take the opportunities on offer as effectively as she had. The fact that they all failed in these lofty goals shows ...”

“... has no reckonable plot at all. It records the school career of a tiresome if talented boy called Gordon Caruthers, sound in wind and solid in limb, eager of attention and sparing of effort, noisy and coarse in success, sullen and mean in defeat, who at length becomes, through sheer luck (the unexpected and premature departure of a better man to fight in the ...”

“... it, which is a large part of the reason there have been so many of them.It was Osborne who spooked Gordon Brown out of calling an election in the autumn of 2007 by promising big cuts in inheritance tax. The policy should have been grist to Brown’s mill – same old Tories looking after their own – but instead Brown took fright when he saw how popular it ...”

“... in The Well of Loneliness bears an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he ...”

“... advantage gained from controlling Persian Gulf hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. In 1945, Gordon Merriam, the head of the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs division, made this clear: the Saudi oilfields, he said, were first and foremost ‘a stupendous source of strategic power’. The assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle, sketched out ...”

“... credentials of the responsible politician, who knows that there will be difficult choices – what Gordon Brown likes to call ‘tough decisions’ – and that the attainment of political ends always involves treating some people as means and not as ends (or, in McCartney’s sanitised version, ‘disappointing’ them). In other words, New Labour understands ...”

“... On 24 July, in a speech to the Rwandan parliament, David Cameron said that the old ideological divisions concerning aid and trade – aid is ‘wasteful’, trade is ‘unfair’ – needed to be abandoned in favour of a commitment to what works. He talked about the importance of transparency and accountability at both governmental and non-governmental levels to ensure that resources were used efficiently and money reached its targets ...”