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Stuart Hall was one of those who named the beast of Thatcherism in the 1980s. The beast is still with us under John Major, he says And that is what [...]

John Major's surprise decision to put himself up for re-election five months early was the action of a desperate man, says Ian Altken. And whatever happens, it's difficult to see [...]

Everyone sees Brown and Portillo as future party leaders. But history suggests they will fail. Will Gordon Brown really make it as the next prime minister? And Michael Portillo as [...]

A foot-and-mouth crisis, a terrible train crash, rising petrol prices. In 1967, Harold Wilson had to cope with all of them, and more. There are certain things besides going to [...]

A SHORT WALK DOWN FLEET STREET Alan Watkins Duckworth, 272pp, £18 £14.40 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+15% p&p) Halfway into this amiable book, it occurred to me that I might begin my [...]

Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the glory days of Fleet Street Ruth Dudley Edwards Secker & Warburg, 484pp, £20 After struggling through the first chunk of this book, [...]

Fifty years ago, when almost everybody still claimed to believe in God, the monarchy and the flag, there was a well-understood hierarchy that extended even into the slightly naff business [...]

One of Private Eye's many contributions to Fleet Street's rich folklore is the invention of Lunchtime O' Booze as the archetype of the steam-age, pre-computerised journalist. Hacks just like him [...]

Simon Heffer Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1,024pp, £25 Enoch Powell committed political suicide when he made his 'rivers of blood' speech. But his influence and ideas lived on, not least in [...]

At the heart of the Commons stands a watering hole where indiscretion is routine and intrigue flourishes Visitors to that hub of our parliamentary democracy, the central lobby of the [...]

One of the hazards facing serious students of Lord Jenkins' long and unusually varied political career - now about to take another turn with his eagerly awaited report on electoral [...]

Ian Aitken finds general sympathy for Norway's stressed prime minister and recalls a few Westminster politicians who could have done with a rest The late great Iain Macleod, whose sudden [...]

Started by a Swiss, cheated by a Czech, the politico's favourite Hungarian restaurant has been saved for the plotting classes A question: What do Oswald Mosley, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Foot, [...]

Satisfactorily preceded by pretty ads for tender coconut bars, bleach that explodes in a filthy sink and five generations of cats eating the same well-jellied pet food, ITV's This Week--boldy [...]

It was my sad duty this week to read the lesson at the funeral service of my brother-in-law John Mackie, whose long life embraced farming, forestry, parliamentary politics in both [...]

Perhaps the ultimate proof of the accident-proneness of this country's crumbling and incompetent government is that, even when John Major tries to do the right thing it somehow goes wrong. [...]

Like many other non-believers, I have always had a soft spot for the retiring Bishop of Durham. As one who sub. scribes to none of the doctrines of the Church [...]

As the Conservative Party tries to out-Thatcher Lady Thatcher, Ian Aitken ponders the directions left open to it It is a measure of just how bad things have become for [...]

Ian Aitken was the first journalist to break news of the Profumo scandal in 1963. Here he compares sex scandals and politics, then and now A fellow veteran in the [...]

I suspect that political historians may look back on the autumn of 1993 as the moment when an intellectual tide that had seemed to be running remorselessly in favour of [...]

No matter how much they may hate her, I strongly suspect that many socialists harbour a sneaking admiration for Baroness Thatcher. In an age when almost everyone else in British [...]

Margaret Hilda Thatcher is the self-confessed killer of socialism. But does the real culprit lie elsewhere, asks Ian Aitken It is not difficult to demonstrate that most of Lady Thatcher's [...]

Ron Brooks University of Wales Pres, £35 When my two daughters were at King Alfred's School, a 'progressive' co-educational establishment in Hampstead which is celebrating its centenary this year, the [...]

Tony Blair and I - plus a number of others, I confess - attended a lovely celebration of old Labour on Monday morning. It was the unveiling by Madam Speaker [...]

One of the standard assumptions among the kind of people with whom I was brought up is that 'they' (de, the bloated capitalists) can always be counted on to be [...]

When I was in the navy I became friendly with a group of three former public schoolboys. We were all cricket fanatics, and they managed to turn me into an [...]

If I were still working as a daily newspaper journalist (which thank the Lord I'm not, sir), I would go to considerable lengths to ensure that nothing bearing my by-line [...]

Not having sat an economics exam for a very long time--45 years, to be quite candid--I am clearly in no position to know what kind of questions are set by [...]

The tragedy of British politics since the war is that the most crucial issue of the period has also been popularly regarded as the most boring. It isn't just that [...]

If there is anyone out there who still I feels an instinctive hostility to the working of the capitalist system--and such a person would have to be profoundly indifferent to [...]

Goodness knows what odds Messrs Ladbrokes would offer against any particular reader of NSS also being a reader of the Daily Telegraph, but I would imagine it might be more [...]

One of the more irritating aspects of trendy political journalism in these pre-election days is the multiplication of feature articles about the people surrounding new Labour, mostly of the 'who's [...]

It was Julian Critchley, the disaffected Tory MP for Aldershot, who first coined the expression 'garagistes' to describe the kind of people who had taken over the parliamentary Conservative Party [...]

It is one of the many paradoxes of Irish politics, both past and present, that it was a proposal to hold an election which led to last weekend's monstrous outrage [...]

One of the many depressing things to emerge from the past 17 years of Tory misrule is the discovery that quite a lot of people I like and respect actually [...]

Alas, I have never had much enthusiasm for Harriet Harman as a shadow minister. Her glacial manner does not endear, to say the least. And, by and large, her performance [...]

Not for the first time in politics, it is the comedians and the cartoonists who are getting it right about John Major and his ludicrous government. While opposition politicians are [...]

One of the late Dennis Potter earliest and funniest television plays was a magnificent send-up of a by-election, called Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton! It was found on a [...]

One of last weekend's newspapers quoted some unidentified Tory MP as saying that Emma Nicholson's father, himself a former Tory MP, must have turned in his grave after her defection [...]

I got a severe ticking off last week in my old newspaper--though no personally, I hasten to add. The target of the Guardian's criticism was the kind of Britwho dares [...]

* But perhaps old chaps like me should stop worrying about the future and spend our time arguing about the past. Certainly it is easier to recapture some of the [...]

Sunday night is nostalgia night on our television screens these days. Last weekend, in addition to the scratched old movies that traditionally help us digest the Sunday roast, viewers were [...]

The Irish, God bless them, never really let you down. just when you think they are becoming throughly po-faced about some issue or other, someone says something that cuts through [...]