A letter from John Arbuthnot to Jonathan Swift shows how London is still much the same, 300 years on

The prime minister is under attack, the Tories are tearing themselves apart and pollutants fill the broiling London air. Oh, and it's 1714.

John Arbuthnot's letter to Jonathan Swift, written three hundred years ago on 26 June 1714, offers a snapshot of literature, politics and science which reveals how much and how little has changed.

Arbuthnot, who created that personification of England John Bull, was a close friend of Swift and a fellow Scriblerian satirist. Both men were close to the troubled Tory government – Swift, its chief propagandist, had escaped to the country while Arbuthnot remained to recount the bad news from Kensington.

He begins with his general mood.

I have with great industry endeavoured to live in ignorance, but at the same time would enjoy Kensington garden; and then some busy discontented body or another comes just cross me, and begins a dismal story; and before I go to supper, I am as full of grievances as the most knowing of them.

He then moves on to the specifics of his grievances, which stem from the growing rift between the First Lord of the Treasury Robert Harley ("the dragon" who was Queen Anne's chief minister) and the secretary of state for the Southern Department Viscount Bolingbroke, a rift which Swift had tried and failed to heal.

I will plague you a little, by telling you the dragon dies hard. He is now kicking and cussing about him like the devil: and you know parliamentary management is the forte, but no hopes of any settlement between the two champions.

With the serious business of government out of the way, Arbuthnot moves on to the Scriblerians' pet project, the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a prose satire of modern science told through the eyes of an educated fool. Here Arbuthnot describes a suggestion "Martin" might attempt to work out the weight of authors from ancient Greece and Rome by deducing backwards from the amount of laxatives they took.

There was a problem about the doses of purging medicines published four years ago, showing, that they ought to be in proportion to the bulk of the patient. From thence Martin endeavours to determine the question of the weight of the ancient men, by the doses of physic, that were given them.

Finally, Arbuthnot closes with an observation on the weather and the London air.

I thought upon the following the other day, as I was going into my coach, the dust being troublesome.

The dust in smaller particles arose,

Than those, which fluid bodies do compose:

Contraries in extremes do often meet;

'Twas now so dry, that you might call it wet.

A month after Arbuthnot wrote this letter, Queen Anne dismissed Harley from office. A week after that she died, consigning the Tories to a political wilderness which included the 20-year prime ministership of the Whig Robert Walpole. (Ed Miliband can dream.) This forced Swift from the English political scene, and he returned to Dublin as dean of St Patrick's. There, amongst many other things, he wrote a little-known work called Gulliver's Travels.