Based on deep personal experience - the author is one of the few left who served in Margaret Thatcher's first Cabinet of just over forty years ago - Howell gives us a new picture of the dramas deep inside government and how yesterday's clashes of ideology and personality have led to today's unanticipated turmoil. Old assumptions are torn apart and accepted versions of what occurred are unravelled. 

 Howell shows how technology has made much of our conventional political vocabulary obsolete, how we now need quite different types of leadership serving new priorities and how, while we wrestle with the issues just before our eyes, much bigger forces are at work which are re-shaping our lives and our future.