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“... foreign staff seem less bothered about handles to their names. What the Guardian offers is a whole shadow cabinet of eager talent, not civil servants with facts but ministers-in-waiting strong in their opinions. People read newspapers for very different reasons. For many years the popular – and populist – dailies and their Sunday counterparts attacked ...”

“... deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front bench as the shadow defence secretary, essentially told Marr that she agreed with the general. Just another day in the war against Corbyn. The Sunday Times had previously run an anonymous interview with ‘a senior serving general’. ‘Feelings are running very high within ...”

“... socialism be taken seriously. With equally political considerations in mind, they elect as his Shadow Cabinet colleagues ‘the best men for the job’, meaning to check and balance him, perhaps imprudently leaving out Benn and Heffer. But the reasons for the original election of Foot remain: the PLP dare not check him too much without risking a ...”

“... That was the only piece Blair ever wrote for the paper. The following year he was elected to the Shadow Cabinet, and his days of being a backbencher with enough time to write pieces were permanently over. During the subsequent years I egged him on from the sidelines, in that way you do when as a clueless punter you accidentally put a bet on the right ...”

“... Ann ‘zero-tolerance’ Widdecombe is even more opposed to it (except, it seems, when used by Shadow Cabinet colleagues and other supposedly ‘educated, articulate people’). Anslinger was lying. In The Science of Marijuana, Leslie Iversen has produced the most authoritative and up-to-date scientific assessment of the medical uses of cannabis now ...”

“... to bring up the big guns. On 1 October 1955, Anthony Eden informed the princess that the cabinet had agreed that if she went ahead with the marriage, she would have to renounce her royal rights and her income from the Civil List. In deploying this threat, the government could scarcely be said to be responding to popular hostility to the match. Gallup ...”

“... in the Westminster hubbub. He remains the last outpost of this kind of critical thinking in the shadow cabinet (following Starmer’s U-turn on his £28 billion a year decarbonisation spending commitment, a Conservative Party website led with the taunt ‘Where’s Ed?’), and the one front-bench politician who is receptive to analyses such as ...”

“... in the process, but served as foreign secretary during the First World War and was still in the cabinet in 1929, 55 years after he first entered Parliament. Winston Churchill was elected in 1900 as a Tory, became a Liberal, lost his seat, got another one, became a Tory again, won the premiership, lost it, and won it back again, retiring from Parliament in ...”

“... Yet a coffin is blocked in boldly, I see, under the washing down of night. The cobalt blue cabinet’s cut on a slant with candelabra making mirrors along its sides peopling it with mourners, delegates from the governments of poetry and from their industries, who appear only as reflections of shoulders. Hostility of moths round the candles. Hostility ...”

“... certainly the most popular Tory in the country. But he clearly does not have the support of the Shadow Cabinet or, it seems, much of the Parliamentary Party. The opposite is probably true of Michael Portillo. The other candidates are unknown and rather unknowable, though Iain Duncan-Smith, the spear-carrier of Thatcherism, is not what the Conservative ...”

“... how all that ferment was more than fun as Gordon Brown and Robin Cook move to the forefront of the Shadow Cabinet, Jim Sillars defeats a muscle-bound Labour Party in the Govan by-election, and the Claim of Right makes a case for phased devolution which will be hard for the parties to shake off. Nationalists, however, are as skilled as any at shooting ...”

“... companion with ‘a very good sense of humour’. It was the hair. Like some made-over geek in the Shadow Cabinet. And the hat on top of it: an affront to any respectable Firm. He had to go. There was even a photograph of Jack in his garden tieless, wearing a cardigan. Goodnight, and amen. Nobody is rushing to take responsibility, but the word is that the ...”

“... from all that over-quoted war poetry, but it can be worrying stuff for those who grew up in the shadow of that war. Here are two academics, with the advantage of eighty years of hindsight and well-tended archives, appraising the skill and judgment of a knot of hard-pushed military knights who, by an accident of history, found themselves commanding armies ...”

“... is in government the PLP has no part in the choice of ministers (though it is understood that ‘shadow’ ministers initially have a claim on posts) and it has no formal role in the introduction and framing of legislation. The powers of the PLP, therefore, have been weak. Why this is so is itself an interesting historical question. The Labour Party has ...”

“... slipped into the room. He had been delayed, he said, by his involvement in appointing the new shadow cabinet. ‘I wouldn’t be there,’ he said with feeling, looking around the room, ‘if it wasn’t for you.’ Then he switched to the first-person plural: ‘We in the trade union movement …’ Minutes after the meeting ended, he was announced ...”