Ninety nine per cent of the time, for anyone who wins or makes money, it makes them happy.

When I was in Downing Street, David Cameron saw me and said, "Please, shout it all around and let it penetrate to my cabinet meeting." So I bellowed: "Gordon's alive!"

I do everything I can for wild animals because they have such a bloody awful time.

I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m.

In the Arctic I met some Russian sailors on a submarine and they chorused, "Gordon's alive!"

I'll never retire. The new millennium is the age of adventure as far as I am concerned. I'm going up a volcano and off into space.

My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler - to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.