You know the illusion of the cheap money is over and now Britain has to go out there and graft and earn its way and create wealth and prosperity in a very competitive world.

I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it's within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don't think that's right.

Autism is a very serious condition.

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 didn't come from a traditional Tory background; it was urban and metropolitan.

The Foreign Office is a very important arm of the British state and I think Britain has a fantastic diplomatic service. We are the only country in the world spending 2% of our national income on defence and 0.7% of our national income on aid. We are the only country in the world doing both of those things.

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.