It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.

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

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

'Helping industry' is the elephant pit of socialism, a deep hole with sharp spikes at the bottom, covered over with twigs and fresh grass.

A politician complaining about the media is like a sailor complaining about the sea.

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

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