Britain Since 1918: the Strange Career of British Democracy, David Marquand, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 496pp, £25

David Marquand is a member of that lesser-spotted breed, the British public intellectual. A politics scholar, he is also a former Labour MP and a regular on commissions of the great and good. Few men and women have participated so fully in our public life. It seems to run in the Marquand blood: his [...]

There is no questioning the audacity of the new Conservative Party. Shadow cabinet ministers have spent the summer carrying out a series of daring raids behind enemy lines: Oliver Letwin has declared that his party has a "progressive vision for Britain's future"; Michael Gove has set the Tories' stall as the champions of equality; and now George Osborne has claimed that they are also the custodians of fairness. All recite [...]

David Cameron, plus a sizeable entourage, swept past, drawing the attention of the senior Labour politician (now a cabinet minister) from our conversation. It was November 2005, and the self-styled "modern compassionate conservative" was on course to lead the Conservative Party. "Does he worry you?" I asked my lunch companion. "A bit, to be honest," was the reply. "But he's fantastically right-wing, you know. You should read some of his [...]

So, how bad is it for Gordon Brown? The polls are obviously terrible, with one showing the biggest drop in a prime minister's approval rating since 1940, when Neville Chamberlain lost the nation's confidence after the German invasion of Norway. Since the March Budget the Conservatives have consistently polled above the 40 per cent mark needed to win power. In YouGov's latest respected snapshot, Labour was trailing 16 points behind [...]

"A brilliant woman is a plague," lamented Jean-Jacques Rousseau. "A plague to her husband, her children, her friends, her valet, everyone." Rous seau would not be happy if he cast his eye over the think tanks of the centre left today, as they are experiencing an epidemic of femininity.

So complete is the feminisation of progressive think-tank leadership that when Jennifer Moses, former head of the Liberal Democrat-leaning think tank [...]

The Sex War is over. Girls outperform boys at school and are streaming through higher edu cation. Young women are now taking home the same size wage packets as young men. But the celebrations have to wait. A new, tougher battle has to be fought. It is not a duel between men and women, but between families and firms. This family war will be won only when parents - fathers [...]

Smoking, smacking, snacking and boozing: ours is a naughty nation. Billboard advertisements for St Trinian's, the UK Film Council-funded hymn to anarchy, were covered in the punitive lines: "I must not misbehave. I must not misbehave. I must not misbehave." It is not too difficult to imagine the Prime Minister setting the same lines for the country as a whole. From diets leading to obesity to alcohol-fuelled violence, reducing misbehaviour [...]

Just weeks after Gordon Brown pledged "British jobs for British workers", figures were released showing that half of the 2.2 million jobs created since 1997 - and all of the half-million generated in the past two years - had gone to immigrants.

Although the figures on immigration are generally treated as "bad news" for the government, the data on migrant employment is in many ways cause for celebration. A standard [...]

It is a place inhabited by "ordinary people with suburban dreams who worked hard to improve their homes and their lives; to get gradually better cars, washing machines and televisions; to go on holiday in Spain rather than Bournemouth", in the words of the new Labour strategist Philip Gould. It is where homes are anxiously owned, families are raised and crime is feared. The Daily Mail lies on the doorsteps. [...]

Karl Marx famously predicted that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers. If so, they have been an awfully long time on the job. (Perhaps they knock off early.) In fact, there is no grave. Capitalism is alive and well, having triumphed on all fronts: economic, social and political. Like democracy, it has proved to be the worst way to run an economy - with the exception of all the others. [...]