I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

I would rather go while I am being urged to stay, than to stay beyond the time when I should go.

A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.

I don't think it's the role of the prime minister to court the press.

I have been reading the press more regularly than others over 50 years and it seems to me that there are things that have changed in the press that have changed its character.

In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.

You don't forget crises and neither does the Queen.