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“... 1998, amid rumours that his job was being lined up for one of New Labour’s rising stars such as Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, Cook may indeed have been thinking hard about escape routes to the European Commission or the Scottish Parliament, but that doesn’t mean he was already a busted flush. He did, after all, survive another five years – and ...”

“... Chauntecleer is noisily pursued by the household dogs and every beast in the barnyard: ‘Jakke Straw and his meyne/Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille/ Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille.’ Jack Straw had been a rebel leader, while the Flemish immigrants who competed with London merchants were among their ...”

“... undemanding exemplars of legends. At one party he is quite near to someone who might just count: Jack Nicholson. He asks Fergie (the former Duchess of York) how he can get talking to the ‘superstar’. Don’t tell him you’re a journalist, says Fergie, better say you’re something interesting like a bank robber. Our compulsively cheeky ...”

“... was that Wyner and Brock’s convictions were a political gesture intended to show how serious Jack Straw was going to be about the war on drugs. The campaign was very active. I remember being confronted on the escalator at Holborn with a fly poster emblazoned with John Brock’s face – a face I hadn’t seen in more than ten years. The campaigners ...”

“... was eager to gain intellectual distinction, and was once a phenomenologist, which is a little like Jack Straw turning out to be a former neo-Hegelian. Phenomenology, which seeks to reconstruct the world from within lived experience, is about the last kind of philosophy Wojtyla should have gone in for, given that lived experience was scarcely his strongest ...”

“... of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by – of all people – Jack Straw. Within a few days, hospital closures had been suspended, as had the privatisation of High Street post offices. None of it earth-shattering, much of it largely symbolic, but combined with the shifts in government style and culture, the initial ...”

“... would hardly have begun. Perhaps it was all that briefing she got from her political adviser, Jack Straw. But the predominant feeling round the Cabinet table was often: will she ever stop? And so, because Harold Wilson could deny her nothing, and Cabinet would do anything to stop her talking, she won again and again. Admittedly, she was helped by the ...”

“... joke of it, though a joke which implies actual presence at murder – killing the Flemings (which Jack Straw and his men did right by Chaucer’s childhood home) was nothing like as noisy as the hue and cry raised after the fox and Chauntecleer. Critics like to see Chaucer commenting on political issues, at least in his minor poems: ‘In my ...”

“... Labour with being the friend of the criminal. Not to be outdone, the Shadow Home Secretary, Jack Straw, has responded with attacks on squeegee merchants and beggars. And now the Tories have announced their latest law and order initiative: a war against ‘yob culture’. At the same time as it calls for a stronger state to solve the problem of ...”

“... at. In the aftermath of 9/11, he and other journalists refused to take seriously the assurances of Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, that Britain had taken no part in America’s lawless rendition of prisoners to secret sites and had had no idea that many of them were tortured there. The truth, published by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security ...”

“... all it owes to the freedom fighters that came from the United States of America and everywhere’. Jack Straw took up the theme, declaring: ‘Britain is also a very old country. It was founded in 1066 – by the French.’ Colin Powell had to concede that ‘America is a relatively new country,’ before going on to remind his audience that ‘it is the ...”

“... to serve the author. He is straight, decent, in an old-fashioned way. When ministers like Jack Straw and Charlie Falconer, as well as Blair, cuss in the salons of power, he flags his discomfort (‘a chandelier swayed gently’). His decency overlays some of the double-mindedness. Mullin lauds the material improvements on Wearside under Labour ...”

“... safest of potential reforms, might get something, but even that is improbable. The announcement by Jack Straw (who else?) that the government would propose an 80 per cent or 100 per cent elected House of Lords, which might be achieved in 12 to 15 years, indicates just how little importance is attached to constitutional reform. The unforgivable failure of ...”

“... and an exotic palm from the Canary Islands. It’s all rather English pastoral. The girls sport straw boaters … North of the square you find Grosvenor Street and a row of fashionable 18th-century Georgian townhouses. This was once the abode of earls, lords, admirals and the odd poet … The location radiates ...”

“... One is that ‘Tory issues’ – crime, law and order, asylum – do not do it much good. That Jack Straw should have been booed and jeered by the police during the campaign merely confirms what Labour should always have known: that it will never satisfy that lobby, and there is little point in trying. The Conservative failure to move the electorate ...”