On 7 December 1916 David Lloyd George became prime minister, leading the second coalition government of the war. No archival sources of significance remain to be consulted to help explain how and why the particular composition of the new government emerged. A great deal has been written on the first years of the war, from many perspectives, but a satisfactory political history of Asquith's two administrations remains to be crafted. A sustained narrative, set in the appropriate context, which relates the political significance of the issues to the drama of politics, to the way individuals lose office and governments fall, which establishes trends, and measures cumulative effects is still unwritten.

‘No matter how often it is told, the story remains fantastic’, wrote Margaret Cole in 1956, referring to the British political crisis of a quarter of a century before. It would be rash to make such a comment today, for in recent years sober research has answered many of the more ‘fantastic’ questions. The role of the Labour opposition, though, remains somewhat neglected; most spectacularly, no attempt has been made systematically to analyse the actions and motivations of its leader during the crisis, Arthur Henderson. A reappraisal is both necessary and possible.

Politicians in the 1880s believed they were introducing ‘democracy’ into Britain and many feared the – possibly revolutionary – challenge it posed to the existing social and political orders. Historians have for some time recognized that the aristocracy continued to play a significant role in each until at least the First World War. The peers' social hegemony, strong institutional position and relative economic security were a formidable combination. Few would now accept Ensor's view that the 1880s witnessed the beginning of ‘the economic dethronement of the landowners’, and that ‘political headship [could not] long survive economic defeat’. The durability of the late-Victorian aristocracy remains, however, a phenomenon more frequently asserted than examined. The peerage was the sum of its individual members; yet the few ‘micro’ studies hitherto published have concentrated on the ‘aristocracy of the aristocracy’ – the elite of wealth and power, mainly dukes, within the peerage. We know little of the mass of peers who were far less favourably placed, suffered real financial difficulties, but whose tenacity and continued sense of purpose were crucial to the peers' ability to survive.

Within a few months of Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor (30 January 1933), opposition was driven underground. Illegally organized opposition was on the whole destroyed by the Gestapo (secret state police); opposition within the establishment (vice-chancellor von Papen, SA chief of staff Röhm) was suppressed in a round of murders; the rest was gradually intimidated, as in the case of the churches. The opposition surviving underground could not act effectively to change the regime. It became clear that in the Nazi police state opposition could not be effective without support from the principal non-Nazi force in the nation, the army.

We have recently been reminded of the existence of a ‘missing dimension’ in national security affairs, namely the whole question of secret intelligence and clandestine operations. It can also be suggested that the question of internal security has traditionally represented another gap, though one that occurs for very different reasons. Traditionally, secret intelligence was often unavailable as a subject for comment or academic study precisely because of its secrecy. Internal security included some areas of sensitive political surveillance that fell into the same category; but continued across the spectrum to regular uniformed police work, a subject apparently too mundane and obvious for inclusion in accounts of political history. Police of all categories belong, it seems, to social rather than political history – the world of ‘history with the politics left out’.

The law of 21 March 1884, which legalized the formation of syndicats for the defence of ‘economic, industrial, commercial and agricultural interests’, was not intended to apply to civil servants. They were not thought to have such interests. There was, it is true, some dispute as to which categories of public employees were covered by this legal prohibition, and the Chamber of Deputies maintained in 1894 that the law applied to workers in industrial enterprises run by the state. But governments steadfastly refused to allow postal officials or schoolteachers, for instance, the right to form syndicats. They did not, however, contest their right to form associations under the law of 1 July 1901, and conflict became acute in the period after 1905 as these associations began to transform themselves into syndicats or to claim rights associated with the syndicat The postal strikes in Paris in 1909 and the rail strike of 1910 were particular causes célèbres