“... relics of both left and right, tattered copies of Milton Friedman and Hayek, Blairite posters and Gordon Brown speeches. On top, some combination of a cross and a hammer and sickle could be suitably laid. Another alternative would be to admit that Benjamin’s ‘continuum’ was an illusion. No revived programme or relentless campaign can possibly ...”

“... now’ – in December 2006 – ‘whether we want to replace them’? The reason seems to be that Gordon Brown was eager to create jobs for BAE shipbuilders in the North-West, while Blair wanted to ensure that the UK would continue in its role as spear-carrier to the US. The US first agreed to provide the UK with submarine-launched ballistic missiles ...”

“... hand. ‘Sadly, the Burmese regime has squandered the opportunity for national reconciliation,’ Gordon Brown said. In central Burma unrest seems to be building. Although Burma is swarming with informers, the junta has often seemed incapable of anticipating trouble. It appeared to have little warning of 2007’s Saffron Revolution, in which tens of ...”

“... of the bank’s pro-capitalist deflationary policies and the resulting unemployment. When Gordon Brown returned operational independence over monetary policy to the bank in 1997, so that it could set interest rates without political interference, he was signalling New Labour’s distance from the socialist arguments that had led to the bank’s ...”

“... rootless, drifting social reformers’ – an admirable description of what has happened to, say, Gordon Brown or Tony Blair. All those Labour shadow ministers who argue now that it will be too expensive to take railways, coal, gas, telephones, electricity and water back into public ownership should read Contemporary Capitalism, especially the chapter on ...”

“... squandered by George Osborne. She didn’t begin her tenure with a buoyant economy, like Gordon Brown. But popular patience has evaporated. A tendency to govern the country Labour wishes it had rather than the one it has is clear in its punishment of a successful export industry in higher education: a new levy on international students may well ...”

“... squalor of dependency’. ‘Until recently,’ the paper asserted, ‘an English voter hearing Gordon Brown’s Fifeshire accent would simply have said to himself, “Labour”; now, he says: “Scottish.” The lopsided devolution settlement has created a sense that the Scots are having their cake and yet guzzling away at it.’ The newspapers accuse ...”

“... advantage gained from controlling Persian Gulf hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. In 1945, Gordon Merriam, the head of the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs division, made this clear: the Saudi oilfields, he said, were first and foremost ‘a stupendous source of strategic power’. The assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle, sketched out ...”

“... credentials of the responsible politician, who knows that there will be difficult choices – what Gordon Brown likes to call ‘tough decisions’ – and that the attainment of political ends always involves treating some people as means and not as ends (or, in McCartney’s sanitised version, ‘disappointing’ them). In other words, New Labour ...”

“... class in a world of illusions, a world where above-weight-punching is thought indispensable. Gordon Brown has been careful to emphasise that the banking crisis had its origins in the US. In one sense that is self-evident: almost any crisis in American banking is going to be a crisis in Europe. But it is an error to assume that the lending and ...”

“... been an embarrassment for Cameron. Previously, his fiscal policies had hardly been different from Brown’s. His aim was to keep government spending at high levels, especially on health and education, and not to make dangerous promises on tax. He had been firm on that, even in the face of a good deal of unease within his party. What happened cut the ground ...”

“... Or as Harry puts it, ‘card schools at our house every Boxing Day … Scotch at Christmas and the brown ale at weddings’. If Harry and Alfie are the same character with different names, Man and Boy and One for My Baby are the same novel with different titles. So why would anyone bother to read the second book? For exactly the same reason they bothered with ...”

“... the breakdown the basis of her programme, and it was this that attracted Tony Blair. Together with Gordon Brown and the rest of the small group that created New Labour, Blair understood that the rise of Thatcher was not an aberration, as nearly everyone on the left believed. A rupture had occurred in British politics, and if Labour was to survive as a ...”

“... of a cheque from the state, made out to my son, for £1024. The cheque isn’t actually signed by Gordon Brown, but it might as well be. The Child Trust Fund was a New Labour manifesto promise from 2001, passed into law in January 2005, giving every child born after 1 September 2002 a lump sum of £250, to compound until their eighteenth birthday. (My ...”

“... any decisions’ about a ‘cuban-american’, to which he replies ‘desp for CuAm’, but Gordon Brown’s precarious mental state keeps him in London. Earlier that year he implores Epstein not to go away: ‘You are the only person who knows everything about me.’Money, rather than sex, seems to have been the chief motive for Mandelson. There ...”