Tom Crewe

The vocabulary​ of British politics is oddly constant. All of human life is potentially up for debate, but over the centuries our politicians have tended to fall back on stock phrases. This is especially true when it comes to talking about the constitution. Some word-pairings are predictable – e.g. ‘constitutional reform’. Some are inevitable: ‘constitutional’...

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...