“... That the next general election will be fought by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Leader of the Opposition David Cameron we do know; but how it will be fought we don’t, in part because the present prime minister will not disclose when he intends to go. Furthermore, both Cameron and Brown are in some senses, but for different reasons, unknown quantities ...”

“... John Major has now been prime minister for four years. For us, as presumably for him, it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors ...”

“... The week before Princess Diana’s funeral and the funeral itself were, by agreement, a remarkable moment in the history of modern Britain, but most of us, despite broadsheet press commentary which was frequently sensible and thoughtful, have found it difficult to understand or even to know what happened. And this, of course, is due to the fact that the dominant intellectual categories of the 20th century are secular and rational: we are in a sense taught not to be able to understand such ‘irrational’ phenomena as the reaction to Diana’s death, or indeed anything to do with public attitudes to royalty, and are frequently embarrassed if asked to do so ...”

“... Nowadays, when a government reaches halfway, a ‘stocktaking’ is expected. And there has been some stocktaking of the present Government, but of a rather muted sort; ‘muted’ because it is difficult to stocktake a government which looks electorally impregnable but whose future course is uncertain to everyone except the Prime Minister. Electorally, there seem to be no dangers ...”

“... The resignation of Estelle Morris surprised most people: not just because of its timing but because she resigned on grounds of incompetence – to outsiders she seemed more unlucky than incompetent. For any politician such an admission is amazing, and that, understandably, occupied everyone’s attention. What few noticed was that she had not resigned on a matter of principle ...”

“... For those who do not admire it, football must seem like American popular culture does to those who do not admire America: something whose spread is both inexorable and destructive. Football is not just the ‘beautiful game’, it is the ‘world game’; something not simply to be played or watched, but an activity powered by all the resources of global wealth and technology ...”

“... The Report of the Commission on Social Justice, Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal, is not the first attempt since Beveridge to consider our social security system as a whole – nor is it necessarily the best – but it has been the most widely publicised and reviewed. That is because, unlike the others, it comes from the heart of the political élite itself ...”

“... In 1964, Harold Wilson described the record of the (outgoing) Conservative government as ‘13 wasted years’. If the present Parliament lasts its full term – as seems likely – the electorate will be asked to pass judgment on 13 years of Labour rule. Voters today seem to have the same view of Labour as Wilson had of the Tories all those years ago ...”

“... Unless the electors intend to play an even more fiendish trick on Labour than they did at the last election, which is not impossible, the Wirral by-election does suggest that Labour will win some sort of majority in May. The size of the victory, however, matters less than the nature of the Party – New Labour – which seems likely to win it. And we must accept the fact that it really is new ...”

“... Very few of those who voted Lib Dem or Conservative, and very few of those elected as Lib Dems or Conservatives, imagined that five days after the election there would be a Con-Lib coalition government, even though Nick Clegg had hinted during the campaign that such an outcome was in his mind. The election result itself was one of the oddest in recent memory ...”

“... Tony Blair’s political career (assuming his interminable delay actually ends in departure) is difficult to assess. He has been, electorally, the most successful British prime minister of the last hundred years: not even Baldwin or Thatcher quite equals him. Yet the record of his governments has been one of opportunities half-caught or missed entirely, of impulses that were sometimes admirable but rarely acted on, of reasonable but not unusual administrative competence, of some genuinely wrong-headed or shameful policies and, of course, a disastrous adventure abroad ...”

“... The modern history of English secondary education begins with the 1944 Education Act, usually known as the Butler Act. It was, for better and worse, the most important piece of education legislation of the 20th century, but was expected to reform an educational system already deeply divisive and inequitable. In some ways it promoted the hopes of wartime democracy; in others it betrayed them ...”

“... The Conservative defeat in this year’s general election is probably the worst suffered by any party since 1931. (The comparison with 1832 is meaningless. The only reliable comparisons are those with elections held under universal suffrage, of which the first was 1929.) Labour, it is true, had a lower proportion of the votes in 1983 and 1987 but on both occasions won significantly more seats ...”

“... The result of the election is indeed a remarkable one: a Government liked and respected by few and despised by some preserved its already huge majority virtually intact, and it did so with a pitiful proportion of the eligible vote. The deficiencies of the electoral system are now more gross than ever, while a three-party system – in Scotland and Wales a four-party system – and differential turnouts have introduced a randomness and unpredictability which the overall results conceal ...”

“... In 1984, Ross McKibbin published an article in the English Historical Review called ‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’ His choice of title was a deliberate invocation of the celebrated essay which Werner Sombart published in 1906 under the title Why is there no socialism in the United States? It does not, of course, mean literally what it says ...”