Public service does not necessarily mean service in the House of Commons, and public service is not synonymous with partisan political activity. It comes in a thousand colours, but the common denominator is: it's not about me - it's about we.

Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

Public service does not necessarily mean service in the House of Commons, and public service is not synonymous with partisan political activity. It comes in a thousand colours, but the common denominator is: it's not about me - it's about we.

What really matters is getting new people in. The constitutional changes matter, but the thing that the party mustn't do is turn in on itself and think the thing we've got to do is fix our plumbing. The thing we've got to do is get new people in.

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.