Frank Johnson, the finest and funniest parliamentary sketch-writer of his generation died, too young, in late 2006. His widow, Virginia Fraser, has now compiled and edited a selection of his writings. It is mostly about domestic politics as seen from his seat in the press gallery of the House of Commons, interspersed with expeditions to
Bernard Donoughue has produced several valuable books, one of them a biography of Herbert Morrison (written with George Jones) and another an account of No. 10 under the Labour governments of the 1970s, which contains the often quoted, though rarely acknowledged, observation of James Callaghan just before the 1970 election, to the effect that there
When this book first came out in 1966 it covered the entire period during which Charles Moran had been Winston Churchill’s physician from 1940 onwards. It caused a good deal of controversy, less because it was in any way hostile to Churchill than because it showed him as a fallible human being. The Churchill family
One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and
It was 1971, at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, late at night during a Tory conference, and Sir (as he then wasn’t) Max Hastings and I were discussing editorship. He was then working for the BBC. Specifically, we were talking about the editorship of the New Statesman. There was discontent there about the tenure of R.