“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley; bogus bank accounts (showing corrupt earnings) were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley; Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in, the assassination of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of ...”

“... episode was an inspiration for Liz Truss during her short and calamitous stay in 10 Downing Street. Truss, unfortunately, wasn’t aware that on the issue of monetarism, the lady was for turning.It’s not as if nobody noticed at the time. In March 1982, the New York Times wrote that Howe’s subsequent budget – in which the money supply was ...”

“... London and Oxford in 1882 and 1883, and created a baronet in 1888. And then there is the case of John Arlott, once Forster’s producer at the BBC and later a broadcaster possibly even better known and loved than Forster himself, though here having to answer to the first name ‘George’, perhaps by contamination from the actor George Arliss, once, but no ...”

“... albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the populist professor of the Thatcherite tabloid press. Whatever else he has lost in the process, it is not his ironic sense of humour, and in appraising one of Disraeli’s ...”

“... himself shirking the real question. He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because ...”

“... the workings of the machine. For those who point out that Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, already did this – did they? Their 2017 manifesto was radical in terms of spending, but startlingly conservative in its presentation of Britain as an autonomous economy, rather than a few pieces on the extra-jurisdictional patchwork of other ...”

“... rain and the traffic in Whitehall.Not anymore. Carved out of the old Privy Council Court Room in 9 Downing Street, where judges used to meet to hear appeals from convicted murderers in Barbados or the Cayman Islands, there is now a purpose-built grande salle for press conferences, knocked up for £2.6 million by friendly Russian contractors. It is not a pretty ...”

“... to prevent itself being ground between Capital and Labour. Whenever employers or workers visited Downing Street, the Union complained, the Government kowtowed to them, while snubbing those at the centre. One of the aims of this ‘aggregate of consumers and taxpayers’ was to urge the Government to extract income tax from manual workers, those notorious ...”

“... sending the message stating that “our war is over” which started the correspondence with John Major, and it is pretty clear in retrospect that one of the intermediaries in the chain between the government and the IRA did in fact embellish the message.’ The peace process, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff is suggesting, began with an ...”

“... irritated journalists on other newspapers. Part of the story he has to tell is how people like John Cole – yes, the same John Cole – and his successor as News Editor. Jean Stead, dragged the paper more or less reluctantly into mainstream, news-oriented journalism. Coming from what at the time was probably the most ...”

“... Sir John Junor made his reputation mainly as the man prepared to be more bitchy about famous people than any other newspaper columnist. This was the basis on which he conducted his column on the Sunday Express, the paper he also edited for 32 years, and which underpins its less successful appearance nowadays in the Mail on Sunday ...”

“... It is no wonder that none of the particulars I have so far cited appear in Jeffrey Richards and John MacKenzie’s history, exceptionally rich though it is in station lore collected world-wide, and assiduous in its pursuit both of main-line socio-economic themes and of lightly trafficked sub-cultural branches. I claim no special knowledge of my own but for ...”

“... Brown, accounts of which made me thankful there are no firearms stored (within easy reach) at Downing Street. Duels are now fought with shouting matches, spin doctors and snide public allusions to ‘the bloke next door’. The toxic mix of power, ambition and exhaustion is a recipe for rivalries: Churchill and Chamberlain, Morrison and Bevan, Heath and ...”