On rereading the essays collected here and others which are not included I accept I was wrong in many particular judgements I made at the time on how events would turn out, although I was careful not to make predictions and recognised that the outcome might be different from the one I considered most likely. Sometimes the contingencies involved made the outcomes extremely uncertain. They really could have gone either way. Take elections. No one was in any doubt that Tony Blair would win in 1997, 2001 and 2005, or that Margaret Thatcher would win in 1979, 1983 and 1987, or Boris Johnson in 2019. Elections which were much harder to call were 1970, 1974 (February), 1992, 2010, 2015 and 2017. Some of these I called right but most wrong. I did not expect Theresa May to lose her majority in 2017 or Harold Wilson to be defeated in 1970. I thought that 1992 and 2015 would both result in hung parliaments. I was also wrong about the Brexit referendum. I expected that the result would be close but that Remain would narrowly win. I thought the argument ‘why risk it?’, the safety first argument would be strong enough among Conservative voters to give Remain victory. In the event 58 per cent of those who had voted Conservative and for David Cameron in 2015 voted Leave and against him in 2016. That was the real surprise of the referendum, not the Leave vote in Labour seats in the North of England. They voted in 2016 as their parents and grandparents had voted in 1975. It was the defection of so many Conservative voters in England to Leave that tipped the balance.

I also did not anticipate how devolution would allow the SNP to dominate politics in Scotland. In the essay on the constitution, Chapter 11, which was written in 2006, the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats seemed likely to keep control of the Scottish Parliament for a long period. Yet within a few years the SNP had not only achieved a majority in Holyrood, they had also destroyed Labour as a parliamentary force in Scotland. The explosive force of nationalism was shown yet again.