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“... There is general agreement that the government is in a mess: sleazy, corrupt, humiliated and, probably even more than the Conservative government in its last days, despised by many of its natural supporters. It is difficult to remember a cabinet held in such contempt by so many. Yet the reasons for the contempt and the extent to which it is shared by the electorate as a whole are less easy to judge ...”

“... Should Labour apologise, and if so what for? Ever since the last election and even more since the election of Ed Miliband as leader, there has been a near universal assumption that the party is not doing as well as it should, that its lead in the opinion polls is shaky, that the ‘South’ is lost, that Miliband is hopeless, and that, consequently, Labour should show ‘humility’ and return to Blairism under a different leader ...”

“... Rupert Murdoch has created perhaps the greatest media business in the history of the media business. It exceeds in scope any of the empires assembled by the Hearsts, the Harmsworths and the Thomsons. Murdoch himself seems driven by insatiable ambition. He is never satisfied. Nothing appears complete, and the old man shows no sign of abandoning the struggle – especially as his heirs (his children) now publicly quarrel over the patrimony ...”

“... Gordon Brown has become prime minister with less seeming to be known about him, and what he thinks and believes, than almost any other holder of the office. As chancellor, he showed an exceptionally narrow concern with his brief and usually disclosed an opinion on anything outside it only if absolutely forced to. As a result many unanswered questions circulate around him ...”

“... Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality ...”

“... Stafford Cripps is perhaps the only major figure of 20th-century British politics to have had no full biography – one based on the whole range of scholarly sources. His political significance is unquestionable: Solicitor-General, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, leader of two ‘missions’ to India, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons, Minister of Aircraft Production, President of the Board of Trade, Minister of Economic Affairs, Chancellor of the Exchequer ...”

“... For much of the last few years Britain has not had industrial relations, at least not that the public would be aware of. ‘Industrial relations’ to most of us connotes strike unreasonable trade unions – all that is understood by the ‘Seventies’. We have repeatedly told pollsters that unions had too much power and were ‘damaging’ the economy; even trade unionists agreed with this, though they usually exempted themselves and their own unions from blame ...”

“... The two major parties approach their annual conferences and the new political season in anything but confident mood. For the Government – as for any British government – there is the usual ‘problem of the economy’, which will never go away and so is of no immediate importance: situation desperate but not serious. More unusually there is a sense, which the Maastricht debates heightened, if only by their impenetrability, that the country’s constitutional arrangements no longer work ...”

“... How should Labour govern? This is a question it is still reasonable to ask, though as the election gets ever closer and Labour’s lead gets ever smaller, it might answer itself. Still, it is a question to which Tony Blair has given much thought; and so should we. All social democratic parties, of which the British Labour Party probably is still one, are torn between two possible forms of political action, which are, in turn, dependent on two possible ‘models’ of society ...”

“... In Imperial Russia there was a ‘What is to be done?’ genre of political writing which was – except, perhaps, in the case of Lenin – rarely optimistic. On the contrary, there tended to be an assumption that there was too much to do and probably no chance of doing it. In Britain we find ourselves, mutatis mutandis, in an analogous situation. We have a government which has scarcely any reason to exist and hardly anything of importance to say to the electorate, but we face an almost unendurably long election campaign which that government has at least an even chance of winning – in which case nothing will be done at all ...”

“... This is a timely and exceptionally interesting book. 1976, the year of IMF intervention, together with the winter of 1978-79, represents in purest form what was for most people (insofar as they have any memory of the Seventies) characteristic of that decade: persistent economic failure and social disintegration at home, humiliation abroad. It is a memory that has also had profound political consequences ...”

“... The Government begins its fourth year in office in not very good shape: indeed, in something of a fix. It is probably not too much of a fix: not being the Conservative Party should still see them through next time, but not being the Conservative Party is a rapidly wasting asset. And it is hard to find anyone, even among those who will vote Labour, with any enthusiasm for the Government ...”

“... When Major Henry committed suicide, Proust wrote that the Dreyfus Affair, hitherto pure Balzac, had become Shakespearean. While the Iraq affair obviously differs from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now ...”

“... Is it misleading to think of the government as shambolic – even comprehensively shambolic? It has made some bad mistakes, but politically it has been fairly stable, so far. The Conservatives have achieved most of what they wanted with the Lib Dems acting as cover – probably more than they would have managed as a minority government. The NHS legislation would never have survived had the Lib Dems not been in the government and decided to follow what they understood to be the conventions of coalition ...”

“... In January last year a directive from John Denham, secretary of state in what was then the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, announced that research funding for universities was going to be rethought.* The new system should ‘continue to incentivise research excellence’ and reward ‘the quality of researchers’ contribution to public policy-making and to public engagement ...”