A book that caught my eye last week was A Gift from the Churchills, Alistair Cooke's entertaining study of the Primrose League. One had always assumed that, like the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes or the League of Empire Loyalists, this One Nation Tory social club, founded in memory of Disraeli, had been swept away by the era of short skirts and loose morals: in fact, Cooke reveals that it survived as late as 2004. Pitched largely at the working man, with the aim of offering him a stake in the rather vague-sounding abstract known as Tory democracy, the league turns out to have been one of the greatest success stories in British politics. Membership in 1910 stood at two million, out of an electorate of little more than seven million, which makes the pre-Great War Labour Party look like the tiniest of cliques.