He will have believed he had no need to define himself more clearly when his poll ratings were high. So now other people are doing it for him.
That’s why last week I launched my transport plan for the West Midlands – an ambitious, 20-year vision of how our constituent boroughs will be linked in the coming decades.
He made grotesque errors of taste and judgement – see “Rivers of Blood”. But even his critics admit that he was one of the great parliamentarians of the 20th century.
He says that while Birmingham itself and Solihull are particularly buoyant, large parts of the region feel that they have missed out on growth.
Lloyd George introduced a non-contributory system – unlike the contributions-based proposal from Chamberlain – and its legacy endures today.
Hammond, Fox, Javid. How will a generation of politicians raised under Thatcher adapt to the new Prime Minister’s desire for an industrial strategy?
We cannot know yet whether 2015 was the start of a new ascendancy or whether, like 1900, it is an anomaly that posterity hardly notices.
Those which turn out to matter usually involve more than the man who undertakes them. Does the latest one really fall into this category?
The parties these great men abandoned behaved in the same idiotic way that ours did over Mark Reckless, or that UKIP is now doing over their departed MEP.
It was the closeness of the family in Joe’s era that led critics to calling them ‘the clique’ – a toast that we still make today in their honour.