“... In practice, such talk meant that politicians were trying to cut loose from their own parties. Gordon Brown, when he was chancellor, once dismissed a proposal from the trade unions to restore the link between pensions and average earnings; in the face of overwhelming support for the proposal at the Labour Party Conference, ...”

“... foreign policies are merely their most dramatic manifestation. To Blair, and even more to Gordon Brown and his kitchen cabinet, America stands for ingenuity, dynamism, wealth and power. It is the model to which we should aspire. This view has always trumped Blair’s Europeanism and has effectively eliminated ‘Europe’ as a model for this ...”

“... that the scheme would be discredited. One woman who had votes ‘dumped’ on her was Mildred Gordon, who, Harman says, ‘had not particularly made her mark’ in Parliament. She was ‘nearly elected’ (this isn’t true: she got 45 votes; the last person to be elected, John Prescott, got 85; Harman got 68) and was ‘amazed and happy … that at last ...”

“... know: let’s find our angriest, shoutiest, most tribal, most aggressive party loyalist. As Craig Brown joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises ...”

“... half within four years. They haven’t spelled out how they are going to do it, and until recently Gordon Brown was talking about ‘Tory cuts versus Labour investment’ – which, given what he must know about what the figures mean, is jaw-droppingly cynical. The reality is that the budget, and the explicit promises of both parties, imply a commitment ...”

“... he did not lead marches. Some politicians became friends (he got the bus with Michael Foot; Gordon Brown was a dinner guest) and in the late 1970s and 1980s he would catalyse a fierce and consequential debate about the future of the Labour Party through interventions in Marxism Today (interventions that were blamed for – and that Hobsbawm later ...”

“... on Social Justice, set up by the Labour leader John Smith. The Commission was chaired by Sir Gordon Borrie, former Director General of Fair Trading, and a director of Mirror Group Newspapers, whose anti-trade union regime under David Montgomery was ushered in with the blessing of the Mirror’s new accountants, Arthur Andersen. Borrie’s introduction to ...”

“... In the past, low investment levels might have been blamed on high interest rates (a charge Gordon Brown repeatedly levelled at the Tory record prior to 1997), since it is harder to invest when it’s more expensive to borrow, but that explanation fell apart during the 2010s, when the lowest interest rates the Bank of England had ever set failed to ...”

“... was plain from the elections of the 1970s. Smith also knew that needs change, and commissioned Gordon Borrie to devise a modernised welfare state. But the Borrie Report’s proposals were recognisably ‘Labour’, uninfected by the neoliberal rhetoric that was creeping in everywhere else. The party could, and should, have stopped its renewal at that ...”

“... now, by extension, included. Subsequently, in a similar conversation with the Oxford sociologist Gordon Marshall, Gordon (who is as authentically Scottish as Alastair) describes watching the 1966 World Cup Final on a flickering black and white TV in a pub in a West Highland village. He was one of perhaps a dozen out of ...”

“... crucial figure in this transformation. But he is not alone. His key colleague is, also obviously, Gordon Brown, with whom there are – Old Labour stalwarts dreaming of a New Jerusalem after the Blair to Brown handover, please note – plenty of personal differences but almost no ideological ones. And then there are ...”

“... where some MPs can’t vote on much of the legislation that comes before it turns those MPs, as Gordon Brown has pointed out, into second-class citizens. It would also effectively end the Union – a paradoxical result of a referendum that supposedly preserved it. The Labour Party’s structure and loyalties were a product of the United Kingdom and its ...”

“... it, which is a large part of the reason there have been so many of them.It was Osborne who spooked Gordon Brown out of calling an election in the autumn of 2007 by promising big cuts in inheritance tax. The policy should have been grist to Brown’s mill – same old Tories looking after their own – but instead ...”

“... purse. Most November mornings, I’ve found myself waking up in the grip of a daft dream-notion: Gordon Brown must be behind all this. Does he need a soulmate on the other side of the earth so badly? Kevin Rudd, too, is a politico-intello often caught reading books, who can write uplifting essays based on them, and even speaks good Chinese. His ...”

“... but they haven’t gone very far. Visiting dignitaries to the Green Zone, whether George Bush, Gordon Brown or Barack Obama, seldom realise the extent of the military operations required to protect them or the impact of these operations on Iraqis, and so get an exaggerated impression of the progress towards normality in Baghdad. Last year, US embassy ...”