Tom Crewe

I paused to take a closer look. There was someone sitting in the nearest seat. It was the queen, separated from me by a few inches and a pane of glass. We locked eyes for a vital moment: if my dead grandfather had been unwrapping a pork pie in there I couldn’t have been more surprised. When we got to Cambridge I stood and looked down the platform to confirm I wasn’t mad and there she was, stepping off the train into the waiting boredom of dignitaries. She was public again, in walkabout mode. But I knew we had seen into each other’s souls.

The​ definition of Conservative policy, according to Lord Salisbury, was the preaching of ‘confidence’: the ‘provision of work … will only exist where confidence exists; when the capitalist is sure of being repaid for his investment’. When ‘confidence is destroyed’, he told an audience in 1882, ‘capital will not flow, enterprise cannot be...

Robert Peters​, né Parkins, wasn’t much to look at. He was ‘a little man with a stiff back who walked like a penguin’. Photographs show him as steeply balding, with a rice puddingy face that glooped onto his dog collar. He was tubby, and got tubbier. But something about him made a certain kind of woman sit up. At the Institute of Historical Research in the 1950s,...

Not much​ has stuck with me from my two years studying politics at A-Level. The word ‘quango’ and what it stands for (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation). And the couple of times when actual politics, the thing itself, knocked on the classroom door asking to be let in. I happened to be in a politics lesson when David Cameron was declared the new leader of the...

Have​ you p-p-picked up a porn pass? In April the UK government plans to introduce – or at least plans to announce a definite date for the introduction of – the world’s first ‘porn ban’, which will block all access to porn websites nationwide unless the user can prove they’re 18 or older. One such proof will be a ‘porn pass’, available at your...