People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.

Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.

Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.

Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.

I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.