Society

Forty-five Decembers ago this magazine was edited by Iain Macleod MP, later chancellor. Macleod died in July 1970, a month after the Tories took office. His daughter Diana, up in town for the Red Cross’s Christmas fair, shows me a stash of her father’s papers she recently found. They include detailed documents preparing for the Heath government’s first budget, and a 1962 note from Macleod to the foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, advising him that young Diana had inadvertently admitted the Russian spy, Commander Ivanov, to her birthday party. Douglas-Home writes back: ‘As we have already had a word about this, I will put no more on paper.’ Diana has little

January 2009 It was a simpler, more innocent world in those days. An inquiry into Mrs Spelperson paying her nanny with Commons expenses was widely seen to be ‘shocking’. Oh dear me! People hardly knew what sleaze was. Ken Clarke returns to the shadow cabinet in a deal forged by Gids over meatloaf — in a briefing we prepared later! Obama is sworn in with the sort of razzmatazz we are hoping to create for Dave next year, on a larger scale, obviously. And I beat 0 per cent interest rates by closing my savings account and spending all my money on an Hermès handbag! February Dave invents Responsible Capitalism

It has become increasingly fashionable in right-wing circles to argue that New Labour has always been hostile to, because ignorant of and anyway not interested in, history. I wish to argue that it is always vital to know your history, but it can be equally vital, sometimes, to agree with your enemies to forget it. When Sir Kenneth Dover, one of the UK’s most distinguished classicists, reflected on the activity of history, he argued that there are two sorts of discipline — ‘scientific’ and ‘historical’. Science deals with universals, gathering and testing data with a view to generating repeatable experiments which prove the case in hand. History, the discipline covering