I did meet Mickey Mouse in California, and he seems to be writing the Labour party's economic policy at the moment.

No other chancellor in the long history of the office has felt the need to pass a law in order to convince people he has the political will to implement his own Budget.

I am actually quite encouraged and I think, actually, the UK is coping with globalisation a lot better than most other European countries. And that is reflected in the fact that (whilst of course there are people who are still unemployed) our unemployment rate is low and (whilst of course we need to export more) we are attracting a huge amount of inward investment into Britain.

Britain wants the single currency to be a success. It is massively in our interests that we have a stable financial system on our doorstep.

What I'm interested in is Britain projecting itself abroad, and through that its values and the things it holds dear. And I don't think you do that by refusing to talk to the world's second-largest economy [China]. In fact, that is positively counter-productive in my view.

You need to have a state pension that doesn't drag more and more people into means-testing each year and make it very difficult for people on low to medium term incomes to save and not see their savings clawed away.

I think we woefully failed to connect Britain to the growing Chinese economy in the previous decade, and I have sought to remedy that. China is now the sixth biggest trading partner with the UK. We have attracted now the lion's share of Chinese investment that is going into Europe.