Search Results

“... elite already getting fitted out for the jackets. If you had predicted back then the rise of Cameron or Johnson or Miliband or Balls, you would not have to be clairvoyant (all were would-be politicians who knew each other at Oxford), just remarkably gloomy about the lack of alternative routes to the top. One of the marks of a genuine oligarchy is that ...”

“... stacked against the government: fewer than a third of its members are Conservatives. Part of Cameron’s motivation for rewarding his chums with peerages after his resignation was a belief that Tories in the Lords are thin on the ground. Finally there is Europe, where the current government is even more friendless. No wonder the Tories are united: it’s ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... but it’s still the case that the costing of the proposals looks shaky. It didn’t help that David Cameron got his Boden knickers in a twist about whether or not the Tories are going to subsidise marriage through the tax system. The sight of the Tories beginning to flounder in this area prompts a dark thought. I’ve argued that economic constraints ...”

“... we know that in 2012 the political fallout was only just beginning. It was in December 2011 that David Cameron reopened the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... has not stood still while May has been doing her duty. The Paris climate agreement, in which the Cameron government played a leading part, was almost the last major international commitment Britain made before Brexit came along and swallowed our capacity to think beyond the current moment. Yet in the three years since then the news on climate has got much ...”

“... middle-aged face belied the most beautiful body he had ever seen, a body ‘like Donatello’s David . . . Those small firm breasts, that modelled neck set with such beauty on her shoulders, that magnificent back.’ In another four days the ambivalence had returned. He was afraid that she was in love with him and ‘it’s a waste of time trying to ...”

“... candidate from the minuscule parliamentary left. This strategy had worked before: last time round David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott as a candidate. In 2015 they hoped a left candidate would take away support from Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may ...”

“... his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet crises. Arthur Marwick boldly opened up the whole question of war and social change. Recently a number of younger historians – Kathleen Birk, Keith Neilson, and ...”

“... The late James Cameron always liked to claim that the only male company in which he felt at home was that of his fellow journalists. They offered him, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the conversational shorthand of completely common understanding’. Nor was his in any way an exceptional reaction. The existence across the world of various favoured journalistic watering-holes – sometimes grandly known as Press Clubs, more usually simply hotel bars with squatters’ rights established – is one proof of that ...”

“... last year of the South East Fermanagh Foundation, a prominent Northern Irish victims’ group, David Hallawell, the son of a police officer killed by the IRA, said that ‘innocent victims and survivors have been betrayed and forgotten … for the sake of the government and votes on the mainland.’The main point of contention is that the offer of ...”

“... before the levee at Holyrood, when he had worn ‘full Highland dress’, described by the painter David Wilkie as kilt and hose ‘with a kind of flesh-coloured pantaloons underneath’ and by a Lowland laird as ‘the Royal Tartan Highland dress with buff-coloured trowsers like flesh to imitate his Royal knees, and little bits of Tartan stocking like other ...”

“... echoed by Nigel Farage. But the most significant precursor to the ‘hostile environment’ was David Cameron’s ill-fated pledge of 2010 to reduce net migration (the number entering the UK minus the number leaving) to less than 100,000 a year, at a time when the figure was more than 250,000. New Labour had treated immigration merely as a labour ...”

“... to the welfare bill. Given their commitment to protect pensioner benefits, tax credits – despite David Cameron’s earlier promise not to cut them – were pushed to the front of the queue, and in the July budget Osborne announced that tax credits would be cut by £4.4 billion. This amounted to 15 per cent of the total tax credit budget, and meant that ...”