Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology.

I am the first male member of my family for about three generations who can have reasonable confidence in expecting that I will leave this earth with more or less the same number of fingers, hands, legs, toes and eyes as I had when I was born.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

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.

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

New!Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.