* Four car bombs were planted by the IRA on 8 March 1973. Two were defused but the others (near Scotland Yard and the Old Bailey) exploded, killing one person and injuring over 200. Gerry Kelly (Gearóid Ó Ceallaigh), then nineteen, one of nine IRA members convicted of the crimes, later played a key role in the Good Friday Agreement and is currently a junior minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

* Tom Driberg and Jim Callaghan.

^† Barbara Castle was appointed Secretary of State for the Social Services, and chose Jack Straw as her special adviser.

* Marcia Williams, Harold Wilson’s formidable political secretary and head of his political office, later elevated (by Wilson) to the House of Lords as Baroness Falkender.

* Nicholas Henderson, British ambassador to West Germany, 1972–5.

* The bombing of two pubs in Birmingham killed twenty-one people. The Provisional IRA was suspected of carrying out the bombings, although they denied responsibility. The incident resulted in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 being passed within days.

* She had announced her candidature for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

* Sir Marcus Sieff was chairman of Marks & Spencer.

* Dick Taverne had been Labour MP for Lincoln, but in 1972 clashed with his local party over his pro-EC views and resigned his seat. In the ensuing by-election in 1973 he stood successfully as an Independent, but lost the seat to Labour in the October 1974 election. He later joined the Social Democratic Party and is a Liberal Democrat life peer.

* David Owen was a doctor, as well as being Barbara Castle’s Minister of Health; Maurice Miller was a Labour MP and a General Practitioner. Gerard Vaughan was Conservative MP for Reading, and a consultant at Guy’s Hospital, London. He was Shadow Secretary of State for Health.

* The National Association of Theatrical Television and Kine Employees, now part of Broadcasting and Entertainment Trades Alliance.

* Wilson had confided to a very few people that he intended to resign in March, and his announcement at Cabinet later in the month took almost everyone by complete surprise.

* Tony Benn was retained as Energy Secretary in the Cabinet after James Callaghan’s election as Leader of the Labour Party, but Barbara Castle, the Health and Social Security Secretary, was removed.

* Teddy Taylor was Conservative MP for Glasgow Cathcart until 1979 (MP for Rochford and Southend East, 1980–2005) and also Conservative spokesman on Scottish Affairs, in which capacity he was presumably visiting the Scottish prison.

* Audrey Wise was MP for Coventry South West. There had been a long-running dispute over pay and conditions and trade union recognition at Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, in north-west London. The workforce comprised mainly Asian women workers. Over 500 arrests were made between 1976 and 1978.

* Asa and Susan Briggs. Lord Briggs was Provost of Worcester College.

* Airey Neave, Conservative MP for Abingdon and shadow spokesman on Northern Ireland, was killed by a bomb which blew up his car as he was leaving the House of Commons underground car park on 30 March 1979. The Provisional IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army initially claimed responsibility.

* Earl Mountbatten and members of his family were on a fishing trip in waters near his home Classiebawn Castle in County Sligo. The explosion killed Mountbatten, his grandson Nicholas, a local boy Paul Maxwell and Lady Brabourne, who died a day later. In the other incident mentioned by Michael Palin, eighteen soldiers in an army convoy were killed at Warrenpoint, South Down, near the border with the Irish Republic.

* Palin’s footnote: ‘Blunt, son of a bishop, Professor of Art History at London University, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, had been found to be spying for the Soviets for many years. Though he had been unmasked in 1963, he had been allowed to retain all his posts to avoid scandal tainting the Royal Family.’

* Bill Rodgers, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, who were all pro-European, planned to challenge the Labour Party with a new Social Democratic movement. Peter Shore was one of Labour’s leading anti-Common Market campaigners.

* Martin and Helene Hayman were neighbours of the Radices. Helene Hayman was a Labour MP, 1974–9, and went on to become the first Lord Speaker of the House of Lords. David Sainsbury became chairman of Sainsbury’s supermarket. A Labour supporter, he joined the SDP before returning to Labour in 1996, becoming a Labour minister in the Lords.

* Services provided by the state including health and education.

* This special Labour Party Conference at Wembley adopted an ‘electoral college’ to elect the Leader, comprising 40 per cent weighting for the trade unions, 30 per cent for the Parliamentary Labour Party and 30 per cent for the constituencies.

* The Council for Social Democracy paved the way for a proper political party, the Social Democratic Party.

^† Contrary to the Thatcher government’s economic instincts, more taxpayers’ money was used in an attempt to improve the fortunes of the nationalised automobile manufacturer.

* The group, including Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, Bill Rodgers and David Owen, joined the new Social Democratic Party with its ‘collective’ leadership.

* Sands was a member of the Provisional IRA, and was elected to Parliament as Anti H-Block candidate whilst on hunger strike in the Maze prison, Northern Ireland. He died of starvation less than a month later.

* Denis Healey, Tony Benn and John Silkin: Denis Healey (the incumbent deputy leader) won the contest by the narrowest of margins; he remained deputy leader under Michael Foot until 1983.

* Derek Rayner was joint managing director of Marks & Spencer, brought in by Margaret Thatcher to advise on government efficiency – one in a long line of past and future attempts to reform the Civil Service.

* Lord Scarman led the inquiry following the Brixton race riots earlier in the year. There had also been riots in Bristol the same year.

* The Polish crisis of 1980–81 was an anti-Soviet social movement centred around Solidarity, the first non-communist trade union association in the Soviet bloc.

^† New Horizon was a charity set up by Lord Longford for young people in need. Jon Snow worked for the charity after leaving university, and is now its Chairman.

^‡ Viscount Massareene and Ferrard was a friend with whom Alan Clark shared an interest in animal welfare, a longstanding cause of Clark’s.

* In the 1981 strike, the government settled with the miners but in 1984 it was prepared to fight. In 1974 Nicholas Ridley, a junior minister in the Conservative government, had drafted a report, the ‘Ridley Plan’, recommending how a government could defeat a strike in a nationalised industry. The plan was implemented in readiness for a future miners’ strike which came in 1984.

* South Georgia is a British overseas territory in the middle of the South Atlantic, about 850 miles south-east of the Falkland Islands.

^† The by-election in Glasgow Hillhead had been won by Roy Jenkins for the Social Democratic Party.

* Bruce Kent, former Roman Catholic priest, and General Secretary of CND; Jack Jones, former General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union; Len Murray, General Secretary of the TUC.

* An Argentinian light cruiser sunk by the submarine HMS Conqueror. The circumstances were controversial because of her position at the time of sinking outside the British total exclusion zone around the Falklands. Three hundred and twenty-three men died. The Labour MP Tam Dalyell ruthlessly pursued Prime Minister Thatcher on the circumstances of the sinking and wrote a book on the subject soon after (Thatcher’s Torpedo: The Sinking of the ‘Belgrano’, 1983).

* Luce, a Foreign Office Minister, resigned immediately after the Argentinian invasion, as did the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington.