The Path to Power

true?” or perhaps I should say “Is it too good to last?” for, amidst all the prosperity, there is one problem that has troubled us in one way or another ever since the war. It’s the problem of rising prices.’

8

‘Pairing’ is an informal arrangement by which pairs of MPs from opposing parties agree to abstain in parliamentary votes when one or other of them wishes to be absent from the House of Commons. The arrangement does not usually apply to crucial votes.

9

See pp. 247-9; also The Downing Street Years, pp. 642-67.

10

A Balance of Power (1986), p. 42.

11

Exchange Rates and Liquidity.

12

Desmond Donnelly was a Labour MP for almost twenty years. He resigned the Labour whip in 1968 in protest at the withdrawal from east of Suez and died a Conservative.

13

In Place of Strife was the — in retrospect ironically chosen — title of a Labour White Paper of 1969 which proposed a range of union reforms. The proposals had to be abandoned due to internal opposition within the Cabinet and the Labour Party, led by Jim Callaghan.

14

See p. 198.

15

Direct grant schools, which included some of the most famous and successful secondary schools in Britain, entry to which was often highly competitive, were funded direct from the DES and were outside local control.

16

The Assisted Places Scheme makes public funds available for gifted children from poorer backgrounds to take up places in private schools. Grant-maintained schools are state schools which have opted to move outside local education authority control.

17

See p. 219.

18

See pp. 213-30.

19

The PAR system was a characteristic innovation of the Heath Government — an ambitious attempt to review existing departmental programmes with the professed intention of radically reducing the role of Government, but with little or no effect.

20

See p. 232.

21

For the Department of Education and Science, see the previous chapter.