“... might wish in some indirect fashion to dissociate himself from the follies and failures of the Blair years, in which, notably Iraq, he is of course deeply complicit. And while we all know he’s clever, he may also feel the need to demonstrate that he’s likeable, or at least that he’s a member of the human race. Alas for the result. Along with every ...”

“... rejection of the referendum outcome at its bubble party conference last September did them in. John McDonnell was right to take the blame for the defeat. His insistence on a second referendum was a huge strategic blunder.Johnson’s first speech as prime minister, delivered to the cameras outside Downing Street, was lucid and effective. This was not the ...”

“... when Mandelson switched from Diet Pepsi to Diet Coke and took his support from Brown to Tony Blair, thus denying his former friend what Archer would doubtless call the greatest of all prizes. It says much about Mandelson’s self-confidence that he engaged energetically in the subsequent war – a campaign conducted with off-the-record briefings, the ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s opinion pages, as did a strange young man who had changed his name from Keith Ashworth to Perri 6. Hacks have a strong craft ...”

“... in Iran, led by the then president, Mohammad Khatami. Together with Germany and France, the Blair government tried to persuade Tehran to demonstrate to the IAEA that it was in compliance with the NPT. President Bush, however, bluntly warned Iran either to reform or face the consequences. He said the US was investigating links between Iran and ...”

“... pressure all mean that the system is just not accountable enough. The most disappointing part of Blair’s constitutional reforms is that he hasn’t faced up to the problems of the central edifice itself. There is no separation of powers, there are far too many MPs, secrecy makes it much too easy to hoodwink Parliament and the public, the second chamber ...”

“... the man whom he succeeds’. His decision to travel to Dublin shortly after his election to meet John Bruton reinforced the view that he was a Unionist of the new school. He has ‘briskly proved himself a true moderniser’, a Guardian leader concluded warmly. ‘The Molyneaux culture will seem extraordinarily remote and anachronistic.’ Word was ...”

“... way healthcare in Britain should be funded that personal hypocrisy is not much of an issue. Tony Blair may not be able to bring himself to educate his children in the comprehensive system that has to suffice for most parents, but when it comes to health he is happy to take his chances with the NHS (knowing, of course, that he will be well looked ...”

“... his own implementation of them than from their exaggeration by his clerical lieutenants, not least John Cosin at Peterhouse, a college where Laudianism ‘had run riot’ (and on which Trevor-Roper bestows the benefit of his analogical instinct, for it ‘was then, as now, a very small college’, where ‘conversation at the high table may not have been very ...”

“... exercises in persuasion, adjust his convictions, and perhaps distort them, to tactical ends. John Aubrey, a friend, wrote that Marvell was ‘of very few words’, and that though he stoked his muse with wine he was careful not to give himself away by drinking in company. Yet he had a violent temper which got him into humiliating trouble in the Commons ...”

“... home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not been entirely rehabilitated. In 2013 the police questioned him about his failure to disclose his brother’s sex abuse ...”

“... English nobility in the later 14th century, if only because in the 15th century religion led Sir John Fastolf to beaueath most of his war booty to Magdalen College. With Braudel on ‘The Rejection of the Reformation in France’ we are getting on. As a parting thought, Braudel throws in the suggestion that the Reformation halted wherever it ran into the ...”

“... who had once been part of that drinking culture but had gone sober. One was Campbell. Another was John Reid, who gave up drink in 1994 after having acquired a reputation as a serious boozer. McBride effectively finished Reid’s political career in 2007 when he fed poison about Reid’s past to the papers. But why did Brown tolerate it? Even McBride seems ...”

“... in February 2003, with Keira as the once and future whistleblower Katharine Gun, watching Tony Blair explain to David Frost why it was necessary for Britain to go to war. ‘Bloody liar,’ she says. ‘They’re all bloody liars.’ Frost and Bliar don’t react. (I remember this too, the fury and the not-reacting.) ...”