I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.

If in the words which the Secretary of State has just used, the use of a nuclear weapon is to be avoided 'at all costs'. what is the point of having one?

A little nonsense now and then is not a bad thing - where would we politicians be if we were not allowed to talk it sometimes.

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.

Paisley has been and remains a greater threat to the Union than the Foreign Office and the Provisional IRA rolled into one.

If I cannot understand my friend's silence, I will never get to understand his words.