If you are trying to take a difficult decision and you're weighing up the pros and cons, you have frank conversations. Everybody knows this in their walk of life.

Politics may be the art of the possible; but, at least in life, give the impossible a go.

I hope that people know me well enough and realise that I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper. I never have. I think most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight sort of a guy.

The first big choice: a government with the strength to deliver stability, or a government that takes the country back to boom and bust.

My course has never been about triangulation, and neither, really, is Bill Clinton's. It's not - it's about applying your values to the future in a practical and unblinking way, and that is an ideological view that is every bit as strong as views from the left or from the right.

My dad was a militant atheist, or is a militant atheist. My mum was sort of bought up in a religious family because she was a Protestant from Ireland but wasn't especially religious.

Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. Conform to it; or don't come here.