* Commonwealth immigration between 1961 and 1991, for example, had increased fivefold.

* Simon Hughes was the Liberal Democrat MP for Southwark and Bermondsey.

* Tim Razzall, Treasurer of the Liberal Democrats, later Lord Razzall.

* Peter Jay was Chief of Staff to Robert Maxwell at Mirror Group Newspapers, 1986–9.

* John Major had negotiated an opt-out from the Social Chapter provisions on employment law in the Maastricht Treaty. The long-drawn-out divisions over the Chapter and the Treaty itself (which replaced the European Community with the European Union) led to a vote of confidence in the Government. The Treaty was passed in Britain in 1993; by now the EU comprised the original six Member States plus Denmark, Ireland, the UK, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Greenland left in 1985.

* Smith’s shadow budget proposed an increase in the top rate of income tax from 40p to 50p, a policy that allowed the Conservatives in the run up to the General Election to cast the Labour Party as a high tax party.

* The European Central Bank went to Frankfurt in Germany.

* Alan Clark, having given up his Plymouth seat in 1992, did not receive a peerage, but did succeed in ‘reviving his Commons privileges’ by re-entering the House in 1997 as MP for Kensington and Chelsea.

^† Bill Cash and Nicholas Budgen were both Conservative MPs opposed to the European Union; Gyles Brandreth, reporting from the House of Commons Tea Room, was now Conservative MP for the City of Chester.

* In 1990 an inquiry into the conduct of the press had been undertaken by Sir David Calcutt QC; it recommended the continuation of self-regulation of the press. The Press Complaints Commission was also established. The National Heritage Select Committee was reviewing progress since Calcutt’s inquiry.

* Michael Mates resigned as Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office over his links to the businessman Asil Nadir, who was found guilty of false accounting and theft.

* The Fresh Start Group were a grouping of Conservative MPs who campaigned vigorously against the Maastricht Treaty and were united by Euro-scepticism (or ‘Euro-realism’) to a greater or lesser degree. Their number included John Biffen, Michael Spicer, Bill Cash, Roger Knapman, James Cran, Nicholas Budgen, Richard Shepherd, Christopher Gill, Iain Duncan Smith, Teresa Gorman, Teddy Taylor, Tony Marlow, Nicholas Winterton and Toby Jessel.

* Bill Morris was General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union; John Edmonds, General Secretary of the GMB (General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union).

* Blair was at this time Shadow Secretary for Employment; John Smith was leader of the Labour Party.

* The death of Stephen Milligan, MP for Eastleigh, Gyles Brandreth’s close friend.

^† Conservative MPs Douglas Hogg, Graham Riddick, Bob Hughes and John Sykes.

* Mowlam was Shadow National Heritage Secretary, and had organised a conference with key industry figures to debate Labour policy towards the media.

^† Ethiopia was in the throes of a serious famine, which troubled Chris Mullin.

* Hayden Phillips was Permanent Secretary at the Department of National Heritage; Gyles Brandreth was at the meeting as PPS to Stephen Dorrell, National Heritage Secretary.

* Lloyds of London, the insurance market, went through ‘the most traumatic period in its history’ in the 1980s; there was a spate of revelations of personal pension plans being missold to savers; and the private bank, Barings, collapsed in 1995 when a trader in Singapore, Nick Leeson, lost the bank £827 million.

* Jill Phipps, thirty-one, was a long-term campaigner for animal rights; she was run down by a lorry which was transporting live calves to Baginton airport, Coventry, to be flown abroad.

^† The proposal was to abandon equidistance between the Conservative and Labour parties and prepare for cooperation with a Labour government. Ashdown had been having secret talks for some time with Tony Blair and leading Labour figures, and visiting his local parties throughout the country, to reach this position.

* Six of eight Conservative MPs who had lost the Whip due to their opposition to the Maastricht Treaty (‘the Whipless ones’) were addressing a public meeting that night in Malvern on the European question.

* The Help album was recorded and released to raise money for the charity War Child, started by film-makers Bill Leeson and David Wilson, for children caught up in the Bosnian (and other) wars; musicians on the album included Oasis, Blur, Radiohead, Orbital, the Stone Roses and Portishead. Anthea and Brian Eno were early supporters.

* Alec Guinness’s son.

* A declaration of New Labour’s economic positioning following the scrapping of Clause IV. Blair called for an economy ‘run for the many, not for the few … in which opportunity is available to all, advancement is through merit, and from which no group or class is set apart or excluded.’

* In November 1995 Paddy Ashdown had been investigating violent attacks on ethnic restaurants in Yeovil (his constituency), perpetrated by known local criminals one of whom threatened Ashdown with a knife while he was walking through the town. His car was also vandalised. As a precaution, the car had been parked in his neighbours’ garage (the Baileys) with their cars, where it was set alight. Ashdown and Steve Radley had to move these cars while his car and the garage were blazing away.

* Chris Mullin had been in Vietnam as a journalist in the 1970s and 1980s; he met his wife there.

* The outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or ‘Mad Cow Disease’) amongst British cattle caused a major public health panic and saw British beef exports to the EU banned for ten years; it was believed to have been caused by contaminated bone and meat supplements in cattle food.

* Brown proposed to remove child benefit for the over-sixteens from better-off families and replace it with an Education Maintenance Allowance to encourage young people to stay in education.

* Talking Heads was an award-winning series of individual monologues written by Alan Bennett for the BBC, featuring actors Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Patricia Routledge, Eileen Atkins, Penelope Wilton, David Haig, Thora Hird, Stephanie Cole and Alan Bennett himself.

* Archy Kirkwood, the Liberal Democrats’ Chief Whip, and Donald Dewar, Labour’s Chief Whip, were privy to the secret discussions between Ashdown and Blair about a potential Lib–Lab arrangement after the General Election.

* The Birmingham Six and Carl Bridgewater convictions were two of several high-profile cases of miscarriages of justice in which Chris Mullin campaigned to free the innocent men. Carl Bridgewater was a newspaper boy who had been shot when he disturbed burglars at a farmhouse in Staffordshire. The case was covered extensively by investigative journalist Paul Foot.

^† The 1922 Committee – the body of Conservative backbench MPs, chaired by Sir Marcus Fox and subsequently Michael Spicer.

* Constituency won by David Rendel for the Lib Dems in 1993; the proposed Newbury bypass was a major environmental issue fought mainly by young ‘eco-warriors’, who unsuccessfully challenged the bulldozers and chainsaws.