Saddam was a threat, that the threat had to be dealt with.

My view is that you still, in order to win from the Labour perspective, have to have a strong alliance with business as well as the unions. You have got to be very much in the centre ground on things like public sector reform.

I think the journey for a politician goes from wanting to please all the people all the time, to a political leader that realises in the end his responsibility is to decide. And when he decides, he divides.

I haven't come to the conclusion that centrist politics is wrong or dead. On the contrary. I think it's very much alive - but it needs to be given a renewal, a revival, and a muscularity which it presently lacks.

The understanding which has driven New Labour's reform is to put the individual citizen - the patient, the parent, the pupil, the law abiding citizen - at the centre of each public service, with the service reformed to meet their individual requirements

She was the people's princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever.

We fall for... the theories of betrayal very easily, and one of the things that's always depressed me about the left, ever since I started in politics, is their ability to imbibe the propaganda of the right and regurgitate it to the left.