“... reform. Possibly the only Labour leader before now who loved office as much as the Tories was Harold Wilson, and he misjudged the moment in 1970. Tony Blair, as far as one can see, might lose power but he will not run away from it. He might, therefore, be the first Labour leader to see that electoral reform is not only desirable in itself but good ...”

“... to make way for his colleague at York, Dr Frederick Coggan. Dr Coggan’s appointment – made by Harold Wilson – has always been something of a puzzle. He was almost 65 when he got to Canterbury and never really recovered from his initial, ill-prepared decision (in which he was encouraged by some naive press proprietors) to launch a ‘moral ...”

“... by George Brown to get MI5 to spy on their left-wing opponents within the Party in 1961, and Wilson’s use of MI5 against the seamen’s strike in 1966. Meanwhile the successive defections of Maclean, Burgess and Philby not only created an atmosphere of hysterical anti-Communist mole-hunting within the service but led to American threats to withdraw ...”

“... politicians. Who exploits who? When it’s David Lloyd George, he exploits them. But when it’s Harold Wilson?2 December 1997. Unable to attend Peter Hennessy’s public lecture on Blair’s version of prime-ministerial government, but he sends a copy. It confirms the impression that collective cabinet responsibility is as mythological as it was under ...”

“... North Sea was not sufficient to replace that from the Middle East and Venezuela – even though Harold Wilson allowed himself to hope that once he retired from Downing Street, he might become president of OPEC.) By the mid-Eighties, however, non-OPEC producers were undercutting OPEC on the informal, or ‘spot’, market. OPEC had nearly halved ...”

“... system without reforming it. (It’s no surprise that there have been few people’s knighthoods.) Harold Wilson at least stopped creating hereditary peers and dishing out political knighthoods. The present Government has not taken any equivalent steps. It can be objected that all of this is symbolic, but in politics symbols matter. They advertise the ...”

“... Britain, of course, where Scoutcraft entails wiliness, such a boy might well grow up like Harold Wilson.) On Fussell’s cover is a picture of a keen-eyed lad with ‘Boy Scouts of America’ stitched on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled ...”

“... bring down the cross-community power-sharing executive agreed at Sunningdale in 1973, a peeved Harold Wilson openly denounced Ulster Protestants as ‘people who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy’. The prime minister’s accusation riled the Protestants, who thought themselves harder-working than their feckless Catholic ...”

“... on, the situation was very different, although economic expertise was no panacea for success: both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were far more aware of the economic problems of their time than Eden was of those in his. Yet neither was able to do much to solve them. Eden’s life spanned the years between the heyday of Britain’s imperial grandeur and ...”

“... survival of the ‘Two Cultures’ idea has a lot to do with politics. The dream of technocracy, Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ image, is held to have failed, and therefore to have been a dream and a failure of the left. The facts don’t bear this out: technocracy remained the mode of both civil and military developments, and the goal of Tory as ...”

“... the ILP when it disaffiliated in 1932 (she eventually rejoined Labour, and as arts minister under Harold Wilson devised and created the Open University). Bevan’s response to her when the ILP left Labour was typically cutting, not to say macho: ‘Why don’t you get into a nunnery and be done with it? … I tell you, it is the Labour Party or ...”

“... in the British Labour movement in the mid-to-late 1970s was mediocre and uninspired. At the Wilson-Callaghan level of leadership, the main features were compromise, consensus and corruption. The future SDP was evolving within the Cabinet; the Liberals and even the Orangemen were abjectly wooed in Parliament. The IMF could dictate terms, often not very ...”

“... of press omnipotence has survived into the digital age. Politicians apparently wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was ...”

“... for some of the aspirations centred on Prince Henry, yet Charles could not. How far Charles, like Harold Wilson, was handicapped by a ‘lost leader’ myth around him is a question to which the answer is not obvious, but one well worth further thought. Derek Hirst is facing a tougher task than any of the other authors in this sample. He is writing the ...”

“... difference-splitting, inexorable in its pursuit of the lowest common denominator. But here, like Harold Wilson before him, Major staked everything on his unique ability to hold his increasingly fractious party together, at whatever cost, only to find that that the party to which he had devoted a lifetime of unquestioning commitment had become unleadable ...”