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“... relics of both left and right, tattered copies of Milton Friedman and Hayek, Blairite posters and Gordon Brown speeches. On top, some combination of a cross and a hammer and sickle could be suitably laid. Another alternative would be to admit that Benjamin’s ‘continuum’ was an illusion. No revived programme or relentless campaign can possibly ...”

“... squalor of dependency’. ‘Until recently,’ the paper asserted, ‘an English voter hearing Gordon Brown’s Fifeshire accent would simply have said to himself, “Labour”; now, he says: “Scottish.” The lopsided devolution settlement has created a sense that the Scots are having their cake and yet guzzling away at it.’ The newspapers accuse ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Or as Harry puts it, ‘card schools at our house every Boxing Day … Scotch at Christmas and the brown ale at weddings’. If Harry and Alfie are the same character with different names, Man and Boy and One for My Baby are the same novel with different titles. So why would anyone bother to read the second book? For exactly the same reason they bothered with ...”

“... class in a world of illusions, a world where above-weight-punching is thought indispensable. Gordon Brown has been careful to emphasise that the banking crisis had its origins in the US. In one sense that is self-evident: almost any crisis in American banking is going to be a crisis in Europe. But it is an error to assume that the lending and ...”

“... been an embarrassment for Cameron. Previously, his fiscal policies had hardly been different from Brown’s. His aim was to keep government spending at high levels, especially on health and education, and not to make dangerous promises on tax. He had been firm on that, even in the face of a good deal of unease within his party. What happened cut the ground ...”

“... the breakdown the basis of her programme, and it was this that attracted Tony Blair. Together with Gordon Brown and the rest of the small group that created New Labour, Blair understood that the rise of Thatcher was not an aberration, as nearly everyone on the left believed. A rupture had occurred in British politics, and if Labour was to survive as a ...”

“... for insight into the politics and the personalities with whom Robin Cook was involved. She met Gordon Brown just after her marriage, but has ‘little remaining impression of Gordon, whom I have met only once or twice since then, and he seems, like many famous people who start their careers almost as child ...”

“... free market – was playful rather than integral to his message. The co-architect of New Labour, Gordon Brown, went a few steps further, attempting to rehabilitate Smith, not without some plausibility, as a proponent of ‘the helping hand’. In part this manoeuvre was prompted by local piety, for Brown was brought ...”

“... the judges, the Scots and the Welsh. There were a couple of weeks in the summer of 2007 when Gordon Brown posed as a modern Leveller. Even Margaret Thatcher had her Norman St John-Stevas, with his ideas about select committees and revitalising Parliament. The Tory-Lib Dem partnership has been noisy enough about civil liberties, constitutional reform ...”

“... to petition the government. He took advantage of the cancellation of foreign debt initiated by Gordon Brown at the G8 summit in 2005, but looked, too, for more economic support from the US. Like other countries in the region, Honduras depends heavily on imported petroleum, and in 2006 the economy was badly affected by high oil prices and shortages. A ...”

“... rather than a cobbled-together document designed to paper over the cracks long enough to prise Gordon Brown out of Downing Street. (He is also a little confused about timing: he gives the date of the formation of the coalition – ‘the most interesting political event I have witnessed’ – as May 2011, a year after it happened.) No doubt Clegg and ...”

“... Corbyn isn’t likely to prove a doughty champion of the Union. Moreover – the efforts of Gordon Brown apart – there has been a striking lack of imagination and verve in pro-Union campaigning. Better Together was known – by friend and foe alike – as Project Fear, but it was hardly remarkable for its spine-chilling flair. The baton now ...”

“... In a moment which anticipated the notorious Granita conversation of 1994 between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he told Stafford Cripps that ‘any time you wish it I shall always be ready to retire in your favour.’ As Bew remarks, ‘That conversation hung in the air for a number of years.’ For, when the ailing and assailed Lansbury formally stepped ...”