People are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles.

In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that.

The life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination.

You have to give the electorate a tune they can whistle.

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

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.

Lift the curtain and 'the State' reveals itself as a little group of fallible men in Whitehall, making guesses about the future, influenced by political prejudices and partisan prejudices, and working on projections drawn from the past by a staff of economists.