The most recent data Newt has accumulated concerns, as we have seen, the speed with which the capital of popularity can bleed away in office.So the Speaker of the House has no information of plausible worth to John Major in his current plight - unless, of course, the Prime Minister is making the visit not for tactical advice but cathartic illustration of what might happen to, say, a charismatic British opposition leader who seemed peculiarly in tune with the public mood and who looked set to achieve some kind of ideological and moral revolution.The story of Newt Gingrich - from hero to nearly-zero in less than 100 days - is not, I think, a story for John Major at all, but one which Tony Blair might usefully consider each night before he says his prayers.. It is astonishing how green the memory of AJP Taylor remains. Taylor died in 1990 and Parkinson's disease ended his public career almost a decade before that. Yet such has been the attention paid to an intemperate and petty attack on Taylor by the 91-year-old All Souls historian AL Rowse that it would be easy to imagine Taylor was still performing on television and writing his weekly column in the Express. According to Rowse, Taylor was "wanting in integrity" and had "no judgement".

"There should have been more people to tell him to stop talking (and writing) nonsense." Rowse's feeble remarks have enabled Taylor's admirers yet again to spring into action. Adam Sisman's large and readable biography of Taylor, which appeared in 1993, ranked him among the best three English historians of this century. A television programme, Reputations, earlier this year, added fulsome praise from the Conservative former minister Kenneth Baker. Norman Stone in the Sunday Times described Taylor as "the most influential historian of his time" and saluted him as "a rude historian of genius".Taylor at his best was a compelling lecturer who also possessed a concise and witty prose style. His judgements were quick, when possible epigrammatic, and usually mischievous.

But that did not mean that they were especially wise or even true. Nor in the judgement of most historians are these the qualities which would entitle him to be ranked among the greatest historians. Unlike other great 20th-century historians - Namier, Tawney or EP Thompson in Britain, Bloch or Braudel in France - Taylor left no followers and founded no school. He is not remembered for any striking new insight into the historical process, nor for bringing new types of historical material to the attention of the world.Champions of Taylor usually argue that the misadventures of his personal life should be disregarded, along with his chat-show performances and his journalism in the Beaverbrook press. His greatness, they argue, rests firmly upon his serious historical works.But in Taylor's case the distance between his serious historical research and his occasional journalism was not very great.