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.

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.

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.

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

I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.

Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.

At various times in the next 20 or 30 years I think it reasonable to anticipate that I will be among the leadershp of the Labour Party, but as far as being leader, I can't see it happening, and I'm not particularly keen on it happening.