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“... I both loved. In 1971 I had voted for Britain’s entry to the European Community in despair that Harold Wilson had turned a somersault on a great historic issue. Later in the Seventies I had warned that Labour’s legitimate 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 ...”

“... a lovely wife, two lovely daughters and a lovely Porsche. Ralph is ‘a pragmatist ... more of a Harold Wilson than a Ted Heath man’. His life is taken up with the disposal of butter mountains and the regulation of green pounds. Everything has gone well for him. But ‘perhaps it had all been too easy or too well ordered: the safe degree at ...”

“... The caretaker Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, never got to hear what happened and Sir Harold Wilson, when he came to power, was told nothing of this fail accompli for three years, and then in so veiled a way that his memory had to be jogged in the eventual scandal of 1979.’ At a time when dissatisfaction with an outmoded Official Secrets ...”

“... of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is clever, and will therefore lose the argument. And he reminds us that Mr Heseltine is ‘a blonde’. Johnson quotes his namesake, the good Doctor, on taking care to see ‘that the Whig dogs should ...”

“... believe, Madame Tashibekova. As an MP who beseeched James Callaghan, Denis Healey and finally Harold Wilson not to send the troops – particularly the Scots regiments – into Northern Ireland in 1969, and and was told it was a matter ‘only of a few weeks’, I understand how the Russians may have felt. They thought they would ‘sort out’ the ...”

“... attempt in 1976 to interest some officers at a Sandhurst dinner to ‘stand for Britain’ against Harold Wilson and the political class generally. His reception was so frosty that he went home early. Civil-military relations in Britain are no problem. Army-society relations are another matter, and one that has long been as important to the British as to ...”

“... point to their success in modifying Conservative policy. There were cries of catastrophe when Harold Wilson, during the sterling crisis of 1967, decided to withdraw Britain’s forces east of Suez; they eventually pulled out in 1972. It is hard now to recall what exactly British forces were doing in Aden, Borneo and Singapore when the original reason ...”

“... aspects of the British class system in which he had been raised. Yet he could never claim, like Harold Wilson or later John Major, to be a ‘classless’ political leader, and he had the good taste not to try. When he called himself a radical, it was not insincere, and many of his instincts set him against self-sustaining structures of power and ...”

“... than that Morrison would have done no better. So the wearisome catalogue continues with Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan: all men of considerable, and different, talents but hardly characterised by resounding political success; that Gaitskell was never prime minister seems hardly to weigh more or less than Wilson’s achievement ...”

“... magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ...”

“... would sing his songs with what this book enigmatically describes as ‘teddy bear gestures’. Harold Macmillan could do a superb impersonation of the languid patrician he actually was, while Harold Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once ...”

“... by those who don’t care to go into a question very deeply. The report had been commissioned by Harold Wilson in 1969, to head off the Scottish nationalists. At the time, Edward Heath was already proposing a Scottish Assembly, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher on the scene decisively quenched the feeble flicker of devolutionary spirit in the Tory ...”

“... he is best remembered now for the somewhat suspect boom he unleashed as chancellor in 1962-64. Harold Wilson, worried that the Tories led by Maudling might be unbeatable, always claimed that the 1967 devaluation was the ultimate result of Maudling’s irresponsible stimulus of the economy – and the mud stuck. In fact, this was unfair in that it ...”

“... man to lead the Labour Party was Michael Foot and that its last Oxford-educated prime minister was Harold Wilson. About Wilson’s leadership people can differ – I think it was by no means as bad as many have argued – but Foot’s leadership, as Johnson points out, was disastrous. Reflections on Michael Foot lead us ...”

“... but the fact that Ben Pimlott, Philip Ziegler and Austen Morgan, three heavyweight biographers of Harold Wilson, under whose premiership the petroleum exploitation and taxation regime was set up, fail to mention it. In Scotland, up until the Eighties, we had contrived an equally toxic sort of alienation: a constitutionalism that bypassed industry. It’s ...”