“... That was good for a chuckle. But it wasn’t all doddering and quavering: Home Secretary Callaghan, that red-faced beadle, knew his stern duty. All the Fleet Street rags, the day after Grosvenor Square, printed a leering pic of a girl demonstrator in the grip of several stout bobbies, her skirt round her waist while one especially beefy constable ...”

“... one thought it odd that the real inner cabinet not only did not include the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, but comprised four spinners and only two responsible ministers. As Rawnsley points out, the curious thing about Blair is that, however much he wants to reject ideology, he is also endlessly eager to explain himself, to insist that there is a big ...”

“... writes of Neville Chamberlain as having exhibited ‘the highest degree of moral courage’, while Callaghan, even as he sacks Barbara Castle, speaks of her ‘courage and great intelligence’. Harris finds this sort of bogus generosity deeply noble, as if some of us actually take it for real. ‘Where such generosity was, in all ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... had no political base in the Conservative Party, nowhere to resign to. They were (like Wilson and Callaghan) associated with the apparently failed doctrines of the Seventies in a party, and indeed in a country, where TINA now had many admirers.The second of these issues concerns dogma itself. The working assumption of the book, as its title suggests, is that ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”

“... the best one can say for Britain’s foot-dragging. It was the way to get shot of what James Callaghan called this ‘poisoned chalice’ with least fuss. It depended, however, on Argentina’s patience. In 1982 that finally snapped. Confused, perhaps, by the FCO’s subtle diplomacy; sharing the British military’s assessment of the difficulty of ...”

“... suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political lexicon’ in 1980 via the Lancashire Tory MP John Lee, who announced that ‘those of us who represent the regions are increasingly aware of the North-South divide, as 21st-century industry is increasingly sucked towards the South-East.’ The phrase first appeared in Hansard a few months earlier, used by ...”

“... Unionist MP are too lightly passed over, especially in view of his role in keeping the Wilson-Callaghan Government afloat when it lost its majority, and Shepherd is perhaps too much of a pro-European himself to give Powell his full prophetic credit. Over and over again in the early Seventies Powell argued that the ‘full-hearted consent’ of the ...”

“... the electorate with the notion of multi-party government as a result of the Lib-Lab Pact with Callaghan, and to stimulate concern about the grotesque distortions created by the British electoral system. David Steel’s most formidable single contribution has been to begin the education of his own party, quite apart from the general public, in the ...”

“... place of business, his favourite famous friend, solid, dependable former prime minister James Callaghan, who developed for the cranky banker what he called ‘a warm personal regard’ – and his favourite regulator, the Bank of England. Abedi used to complain to his progressive friends that the Bank of England would never let BCCI into its ...”

“... Labour Party. It has rejected its more recent past, it has become equivocal about the Wilson and Callaghan years: 1945, dirigisme within a Tory state, remains its one claim honourably to have existed. If it is returned to power and takes Raymond Plant’s advice, it will do nothing to reduce the unchecked power of the executive. In any event, as Anderson ...”

“... for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of American blacks, claim “blackness” – or in this case Scottishness – as our dominant identity?’ Lloyd was not alone in feeling that his ...”

“... oiks, like Peter Wright (Bishop’s Stortford High School) and, more recently, David Shayler (John Hampden Grammar, High Wycombe). The latest, Richard Tomlinson, doesn’t quite fit – he got a scholarship from a state primary school to a ‘prestigious public school’. The motives for whistleblowing can be various: high principle, personal ...”

“... the 1960s until the late 1980s, Williams did an enormous amount of public speaking. Wilson and Callaghan both kept her close (and in the camera’s eye) during elections, well aware of Labour’s need to appeal across class lines and especially to women; later, the SDP used her to make important speeches and fight important fights. She found that role ...”