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“... and exotic literary figure with a fag on her lip, sniffing glue (in which she was a pioneer) and downing gin and Guinness. Not quite in the bosom of a busy family, she lived to a good age. While being helpful to her biographer, George Barker had a last and characteristically opacious word. ‘I find nothing quite so contemptuous as the art of temporal ...”

“... Starmer said that ‘every one of our national missions depends on it.’ After six months in Downing Street, he was reassuring us that ‘what Rachel Reeves and I have done is to make it clear to each of our cabinet colleagues that in each of their briefs, growth is the number one mission.’Starmer is not unusual in this emphasis. Groucho Marx once said ...”

“... in one day, or the current Prime Minister’s son is found paralytic in Leicester Square after downing many pints, it is seen as a manly rite of passage. Beer Street is as wholesomely British as it was in Hogarth’s day (not so Drug Lane). AA rests on mysterious foundations. Given the inviolable ‘tradition’ of anonymity (‘the spiritual foundation of ...”

“... Moore, ‘the most pointlessly combative person in human history’. At one point someone at the Downing Street switchboard, ‘at the end of a not untypical day’, makes the mistake of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both homicidal and suicidal’. He means it, too. All this makes his Diaries a strange read, because they are ...”

“... ambitious, which is to build the case against deliverology from the story of Blair’s time in Downing Street. He lacks the resources to do that. There are two problems. First, much of the ground he covers, unlike his tales of Blair’s recent escapades, is a matter of public record, so he needs to be careful that he gets the facts right. He isn’t. I ...”

“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of ...”

“... Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle. The military deployments for ...”

“... political memoirists, Gordon Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what ...”

“... should remain in the army. His party disagreed, and he was summoned to see Neville Chamberlain in Downing Street. He agreed to stand on condition that he could fight the election in uniform and could return to his regiment even if he won. The prime minister readily agreed. As there was a wartime electoral truce between the main parties, he won the seat ...”

“... of pounds’ worth of construction work on order from one of Britain’s top builders, Sunley. John MacArthur, a senior director of Kleinwort Benson, told millions of people watching Channel Four’s Business Programme that the Fayeds’ business empire was worth ‘seven billion dollars’. Now, everyone knows that many of the Fayeds’ claims were ...”

“... through two world wars to see The Female Eunuch published and watch Margaret Thatcher arrive in Downing Street. Contraception, education, economic independence all became widely available to women in their lifetimes, while the institutions that had seemed to frame their destiny at birth, the empire, the class system and marriage, came to count for much ...”

“... another high-toned writer, I started journalistic life on the Express, initially the Sunday in John Junor’s long days, then the Daily under Roy Wright. Beaverbrook had been dead by then for ten years. The amiable son, who touchingly refused the title in a spirit of unaffected and perhaps warranted humility, reigned rather than ruled in his place and was ...”

“... James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a British representative at Strasbourg. But it is no surprise to me that in over twenty years as an ...”

“... Grandfather was John Wesley Lloyd, son of the Rev. John Lloyd from Llanidloes; after an education at Kingswood School, entry to which was restricted to the sons of Methodist ministers, he became a dentist and moved to Liverpool. His own son, also John Wesley Lloyd, was ineligible for Kingswood and sent therefore to the Methodist-inspired Leys School in Cambridge as the next best thing; he qualified in medicine but, like his eponymous father, became a Liverpool dentist – chapel-going, teetotal, Liberal ...”

“... the sort of person who has to have jokes explained to her, while the book is positively witty. The Downing Street Years is a formidable work, as one would have expected of a woman who was nothing if not formidable. It is professional in every sense: a team product, with Mrs Thatcher directing a crew of ghostwriters, researchers, typists, archivists and ...”