It is obvious I shall have to abandon my hopes of getting the Queen's head off the stamps.

In developing our industrial strategy for the period ahead, we have the benefit of much experience. Almost everything has been tried at least once

Experience is the only real teacher and if you keep a diary you get three bites at educating yourself - when it happens, when you write it down, and when you reread it and realise you were wrong. Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn't believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.

It's lovely to be old. I've got age, experience and zero personal ambition. No body could corrupt me by anything: possibly a job in the government, a peerage, a quango, I don't want any of it.

Someone comes every morning at nine o'clock to see if I am still alive. I do get lonely, yes, but I have the children who come and see me. I see all my children every week, and there are the grandchildren, too.

The Internet is only the street corner meeting on a big scale

There is no connection between imperialism and democracy. I mean when we ran an Empire which we did when I was born, there was no democracy anywhere.