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“... are also more than usually absurd. Look at those silly clips of Paddy Ashdown playing hopscotch or John Major on his knees in a day-nursery or Tony Blair in his Newcastle soccer-strip. Who do these people think they’re fooling? Why don’t they treat us as grown-ups? What’s happened to the issues? To this, the politicians might retort: where did those ...”

“... energy minister, Tim Eggar, looks on. ‘From the UK’s point of view, our interest was that our major flag-bearing company BP had a very major part in that contract,’ Eggar told an Azerbaijani magazine. (After stepping down in 1997, he took up various roles in the oil industry, including chairing a joint venture between ...”

“... the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’ Motion by John Dunning, passed by the House of Commons, 6 April 1780. A constitution is a device for limiting the power of the executive. That ought to answer the question whether Britain needs one. For most of the 20th century, indeed ever since the Parliament Act of 1911 ...”

“... of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch was more interested in wrecking John Major’s media legislation than anything else, and had procured from Tony Blair a promise that once in power he would dilute any such legislation. McKnight also argues – convincingly – that were Murdoch interested only in the opinion polls he would ...”

“... Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality ...”

“... represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older generation in my family gathered they talked about the Fenians and evictions, Black and Tan ...”

“... Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling ...”

“... is the prospect of a two-speed Europe, in which Britain would be consigned to the slow lane. John Major and Douglas Hurd believe Britain will be in control of the 1996 agenda, and dismiss the possibility that others any longer wish to move faster towards integration than they do. Therefore, they contend, the old model of fast and slow tracks is out ...”

“... is to keep them down: these are all notions that such papers frequently circulate. Not a single major Jewish-American organisation has ever unequivocally opposed the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, nor has any major Jewish leader ever said a positive thing about Palestinian self-determination and freedom. The ...”

“... his heirs. Henry certainly needed all the heavenly help he could get. Succeeding his father King John while still a child of nine, and hastily crowned at Gloucester with improvised regalia, he had himself recrowned several years later at Westminster. He was to remain preoccupied with the symbols and reality of royal legitimacy for the rest of his ...”

“... story has been mythologised. The only one who didn’t want to be her was her immediate successor. John Major got the job because people were finally sick to the back teeth of Thatcher’s governing style. It is hardly surprising that political leaders should try to avoid replicating the failure that immediately preceded their arrival at the summit. ...”

“... went wrong, we can reflect on this historic election. The share of the total vote won by the two major parties changed only slightly, but Ukip replaces the Lib Dems as the third party by number of votes and the SNP is the third party in the Commons by number of seats and will inherit the Lib Dems’ privileges and its office space. This fragmentation favours ...”

“... This was colloquially known as the royal numerals case, brought by the nationalist politician John MacCormick against the assumption by the new queen of the style Elizabeth II – though she was patently the first monarch by the name of Elizabeth to reign over the post-1707 United Kingdom. Although Cooper found that MacCormick had no standing to bring the ...”

“... an attempt to restore a commission of public accounts, calling it a Tory conspiracy.The other major difficulty for those seeking to purify office-holding was the enormous increase in state activity between 1690 and 1820, a consequence of repeated costly wars for global supremacy and the associated acquisition of new imperial territory, as well as ...”

“... began to follow the first GCSE courses under the National Curriculum, the Education Minister John Patten infuriated the teaching profession by announcing an immediate review of the Statutory Order for English. No sooner had the review been announced than Mr Patten and his fellow ministers did their best to pre-empt its outcome. They let it be known that ...”