The Geiger-counter of Olympomania is going to go zoink off the scale.

I think it is going to be wonderful. I went to the Paralympics in Beijing and have seen how brilliant the sport is at first hand. People are going to love it. It is going to change people's attitudes to Paralympians and it is going to be a great show.

Never in my life did I think I would be congratulated by Mick Jagger for achieving anything.

He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well.

All the people I talk to, increasingly, can see that the emperor has got no clothes. The case for leaving [the EU] is now overwhelming.

Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it - a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.

You are part of our Great British family.