“... for the diversity of opinion and freedom of information on which correct decision-making depends. John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government is probably the most lucid defence of democracy in these terms. The difficulty here, however, is the widely accepted ignorance and fickleness of the masses. Cognitive defences of democracy tend to ...”

“... lively girl is senselessly dead. That’s all.8 March. A phrase often in the mouth of Bush and Blair is ‘Our patience is exhausted.’ It’s a phrase that is seldom used by anyone who had much patience in the first place; Hitler was quite fond of it.14 March. To Oxford to vote for the chancellor, though it doesn’t seem very long since I did the same ...”

“... Wilson, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and the triumvirate of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Tony Blair (an honorary American in this context). Wilson promoted the idea of the United States as the country whose mission was to make the world safe for democracy. Truman launched the national security state with mobilisation in peacetime. Two terms of Reagan ...”

“... but even here his illuminating suggestions must be weighed against the distinguished essay by John Creaser in the Lindley volume which points, heretically and convincingly, to the ‘royalism’ of Comus, or at least of the occasion for which it was written. The radicals were apparently against ‘authoritarianism’ – but who was more authoritarian ...”

“... towards radical conservatism, Carlylism can also be discerned at work beneath the surface of Tony Blair’s Christian Socialism, a line which descends via F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Blair contrives to put an upbeat spin on his ‘muscular Christianity’ (‘tough’ is his favoured term) but the essence of ...”

“... by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know it, or if we do not know it, we ought to know it.’ Once, governments had ...”

“... an act of parliament in September 2000. Westminster proved more cautious: SAD’s UK organiser, John Hipkin, was rebuffed by the first Blair administration, after meeting with the then armed forces minister, John Reid. The figures for military executions are puzzling. The French were ...”

“... been the subjects of complaints to the UK by the regimes they had fled. After 9/11, however, Tony Blair professed a desire to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with President Bush. It would have been difficult to match Bush’s executive onslaught on constitutional rights in the US, by means of the Patriot Act; the designation of ‘enemy combatants’ and ...”

“... and called and texted Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He also contacted John Glen and Jesse Norman, two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s department.Despite Cameron’s efforts – and at least ten meetings with Treasury officials – Greensill wasn’t given access to the CCFF scheme, but it did ...”

“... of the 1974 debacle, performed a series of craven contortions as he compliantly followed Tony Blair’s mazy hesitations on devolution. Blair was an instinctive centraliser and control freak, who breezily likened the projected Scottish Parliament to an English parish council, yet in his early years as party leader also ...”

“... was a fine thing (our entry was acclaimed by the whole of the press as well as by Neil Kinnock and John Smith): a view which held until, roughly, September 1992, when the conviction grew on all sides that it had been a colossal mistake. Few will argue with John Major’s asssumption that the 1997 election was lost on Black ...”

“... successive British Governments were well aware of this, as were the Unionists. In 1993, however, John Hume’s talks with Gerry Adams reached the point where an unconditional cessation of IRA violence became a real possibility and the Major Government was persuaded by Dublin to open the way for such a development by committing itself publicly to the Irish ...”

“... of more than six hundred men and boys at Guantanamo Bay has likewise been brushed aside. Even Tony Blair’s pleas for the repatriation of the British citizens – a selectivity of concern that Lord Steyn rightly condemned – have as yet produced no results. Those who harbour hope for a fair trial for Saddam need only look to America’s ‘legal black ...”

“... the media. Stanley Hoffman, the veteran Harvard professor of European studies, wrote recently that Blair, ‘in his determination to give wholehearted support to the United States over Iraq’, helped the Bush team’s campaign against Saddam Hussein ‘by supplying sometimes dubious "data” provided by [the] British security services’. In the light of the ...”

“... guardsmen and their horses in the royal parks. A missile fired from a truck and narrowly missing John Major’s cabinet in Downing Street was met with astonishment as much as alarm. The IRA had come to learn that one bomb in London had more impact than ten in Northern Ireland. Yet since it concentrated on commercial targets in the City, where its attacks had ...”