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“... that I discovered how much sharp observation and serious analysis it contained. It was left to Douglas Hurd, her successor at No 10 when Heath moved in, to pay tribute to its underrated importance, and his book, too – An End to Promises – is most illuminating about that private relationship on which British government pivots.And yet despite all ...”

“... preferred candidate from the start, but Black would not wear him. So the paper championed Douglas Hurd as a weightier alternative to John Major, whom Hastings regarded as attractive but not up to the job. When Major emerged from the second ballot as the winner, Black was in the uncomfortable position of owning a Conservative paper, arguably the ...”

“... used it to demonstrate a completely different ideology from that of the present government. Douglas Hurd, the last effective home secretary, made little attempt to exploit the Home Office for electoral mobilisation. The rot began with Michael Howard, who was resolute in his attempt to make Labour appear ‘soft’ on crime, immigration etc. In ...”

“... of the 1995 Pergau Dam case. The facts of the case were startling. The foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, was proposing, for overtly political reasons, to go ahead with a subvention of £316 million to Malaysia for a hydroelectric project which the government’s Overseas Development Administration had advised would be uneconomic, an abuse of the ...”

“... at motorway service stations in the UK, but he left Britain’s Bosnia policy, such as it was, to Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, and Malcolm Rifkind, the Defence Secretary (and briefly Hurd’s successor). One of Simms’s subterranean themes is the extent to which the old guard – ...”

“... on TV, thereby producing outrage in the Foreign Office and Downing Street. ‘Nauseating,’ says Douglas Hurd, and Mrs Thatcher is said to have thrown up her hands in horror. There’s some hypocrisy here. The programme was foolish, the propaganda crude, and Saddam H. an obvious villain, but politicians have always made a beeline for babies. This ...”

“... a Red agent and the man’s who’s going to wreck their careers. I fell into a conversation with Douglas Hurd. His is a split personality. A deux he is delightful, clever, funny, observant, drily cynical. But get him any where near ‘display’ mode, particularly if there are officials around, and he might as well have a corncob up his arse. Michael ...”

“... Partly because, over the weekend between the two ballots, Major performed far better on TV than Douglas Hurd and the constituency officers rang their MPs to tell them to go for him. But it’s not a coincidence that Major had spent years being nice to every Tory MP he met, offering himself as a walking tabula rasa on which they could write their own ...”

“... and politicians who get over-eager in war is intolerable. It is better to have Cook in power than Douglas Hurd. But so what? Cook’s elevation does not justify arms deals and evasion. This human rights Report is a sham. It is not merely insulting to the intelligence, but reveals how Old Britain survives for all the talk of constitutional ...”

“... them. In the Daily Telegraph, Norman Tebbit appears as a crazed, bloodthirsty infantryman, with Douglas Hurd and Peter Walker mounted behind him, apparently duetting the Iron Duke’s quip: ‘I don’t know what effect he will have upon the enemy, but, by God, he terrifies me.’ Garland’s cartoon is derivative and poorly executed (it has nothing to ...”

“... stumbled on through the 1980s responding ineffectively to growing tabloid contempt until, in 1989, Douglas Hurd set up a Home Office committee under David Calcutt QC to consider measures (including legislative measures) to protect individual privacy against the press. Calcutt was given a year to report, and it was while his committee was at work that ...”

“... including lunches with Kenneth Baker, dinner parties at Tristan Garel-Jones’s with the likes of Douglas Hurd, and a proper nosh-up with the brown sauce man in person – Mr Major. But everything has so far foundered on the inability of the Tories to promise Owen and his two remaining SDP colleagues, John Cartwright and Rosie Barnes, a clear run in ...”

“... over the battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time,’ Douglas Hurd wrote in his diary. Only months later the Poulson affair burst into public view. When Maudling refused to resign, the cabinet secretary cleverly insisted that the Metropolitan Police be involved in the inquiry. Since Maudling could hardly be the ...”

“... herself was being worn down by the relentless pressure. So he got his way, with a little help from Douglas Hurd, and it is arguably the sole significant achievement of his political career up until the moment he became PM. It is also arguably the most significant factor in condemning this country to the most sustained and damaging recession since the ...”

“... practical. Obsessional secrecy is self-defeating. If the British media are fixated on spookery – Douglas Hurd once observed that journalists would get excited by a blank sheet of paper if it was stamped ‘Secret’ – more openness would divert their energy towards hunting out the everyday deceits of ‘normal’ politics.According to Sir Rodric ...”