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“... secretaries of the 1980s, who believed little could be done about crime, things got out of hand. Michael Howard’s tough regime and then Straw’s were necessary to get matters back under control. Yet the fuddy-duddies were on the whole right: imprisoning everyone does not work. Howard set out to exploit the assumption that Labour was vulnerable on crime by ...”

“... of Franklin Roosevelt’s public works project, the Civilian Conservation Corps, echoing Michael Hogan’s arguments about the influence on the ERP of New Deal-style ‘corporatism’, and betraying more than a hint of nostalgia for the social democratic politics of an earlier era. Mills explores the way the Marshall Plan was invoked as a precedent ...”

“... legally necessary. Wilmshurst’s line manager, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, shared her view that a second resolution was legally necessary. But Wood did not resign. He briefly considered it, he told Chilcot, but decided not to follow Wilmshurst. ‘Questions of conscience are very individual questions,’ he told the ...”

“... managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television ...”

“... work-related trips west and mainly sybaritic visits south to an interesting set around a Judge Powell, but not much after the 1920s. Did he mean Key West, which he visited for the last time in 1940, discouraged as much by its growing ‘literariness’ as by its impending reorientation as a naval base; or Havana, where he once spent a single ...”

“... leaders learned from Peel’s rapid fall. In recent years, aspirants to the role, like Michael Heseltine and Theresa May, have spent Friday evenings eating and drinking with Conservative constituency associations on the ‘rubber chicken circuit’. This interaction is much more than gestural; so is the requirement that the party leader face ...”

“... the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first novel, Dusty ...”

“... here by our own volition and our own neglect. Robinson shows that Hill began his poem in the year Powell made his speech, and he adds that the speech was delivered to the Conservative Political Centre ‘at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham; that is to say, in the modern-day regional capital of Offa’s Mercia’. Though Robinson deserves credit for tracing ...”

“... and cheers will have rung round the Armed Forces when the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, had the courage to say this publicly to his Secretary of State. The latest forecast is that, after the departure from Iraq of the 27,000 troops committed to whatever fighting takes place, 15,000 will be required to secure and police the ...”

“... There was an increasing reliance on court favourites – particularly Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell, the man Campbell describes as the real deputy prime minister. 7. Campbell is interesting on Thatcher’s attitude to local government and here he attempts some psychological history. He makes the point that Thatcher loathed not just Labour, but all local ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... of falsifying business records concerning funds channelled by Trump, via his former consigliere Michael Cohen, to the porn actress Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about sexual encounters with him. But evidence of the Trump Organisation’s dodgy finances has been accumulating for years. Indeed, in a different suit in civil court, filed by the New York ...”

“... where she intended to remind Reagan of some hard political truths. Her principal aide, Charles Powell, drafted a memo in which he laid bare the core of the argument she would need to get across to the president (the emphasis comes from Thatcher’s annotations of the text): You will cause me very real political difficulties if you pursue your proposal for ...”

“... with their knowledge of current affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then ...”

“... a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States ...”