Modern history is, as you all know, full of examples of great movements that disappeared because they had ceased to have any genuine reason for existence. The important thing is to have a faith to live by, and that goes for us in this party.

Thinking ahead, what really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class - the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones.

In all my life I have treated the press with marked contempt and remarkable success.

The kind of people I myself represent in parliament; salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, these are, in a political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious.

One thing about bureaucrats is that they never swallow their young. Leave them alone and you'll find them increasing every year.

When people meet my wife they think better of me. They say: "With a wife like that, he can't be as bad as we thought".

A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful moneymaker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example. A manager may be tough and practical, squeezing out, while the going is good, the last ounce of profit and dividend, and may leave behind him an exhausted industry and a legacy of industrial hatred. A tough manager may never look outside his own factory walls or be conscious of his partnership in a wider world. I often wonder what strange cud such men sit chewing when their working days are over, and the accumulating riches of the mind have eluded them.