All Quotes

"I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis."

"The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP, they have run out of better ideas."

"The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition."

"I could not fail to disagree with you less."

"Not even Mr Blair has been able to erode the unions conviction that we all have a “right” to a minimum wage... Both the minimum wage and the Social Charter would palpably destroy jobs."

"Any seat would be mad not to take him. He's a terrific chap."

"It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall."

"As snow-jobs go, this beats the Himalayas."

"That is the best case for Bush; that, among other things, he liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me."

"Some readers will no doubt say that a devil is inside me; and though my faith is a bit like Magic FM in the Chilterns, in that the signal comes and goes, I can only hope that isn't so."

"If Amsterdam or Leningrad vie for the title of Venice of the North, then Venice - what compliment is high enough? Venice, with all her civilisation and ancient beauty, Venice with her addiction to curious aquatic means of transport, yes, my friends, Venice is the Henley of the South."

"[On Tony Blair] He's lost the plot, people tell me. He's drifting rudderless in the wide Sargasso Sea of New Labour's ideological vacuum."

"Look the point is ... er, what is the point? It is a tough job but somebody has got to do it."

"It was a stellar performance. I may as well give up now and make way for an older man."

"There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge."

"My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive."

"I didn't see it, but it sounds barbaric. It's become like cock-fighting: poor dumb brutes being set upon each other by conniving television producers."

"Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix, and stay conscious."

"I have not had an affair with Petronella. It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle. It is all completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture. I am amazed people can write this drivel."

"Tremendous, little short of superb. On cracking form."

"I advise you all very strongly - go for a run, get some exercise, and have a beautiful day."

"Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under."

"My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters."

"But here's old Ken - he's been crass, he's been insensitive and thuggish and brutal in his language - but I don't think actually if you read what he said, although it was extraordinary and rude, I don't think he was actually anti-Semitic."

"Howard is a dynamic performer on many levels. There you are. He sent me to Liverpool. Marvellous place. Howard was the most effective Home Secretary since Peel. Hang on, was Peel Home Secretary?"

"I'm having Sunday lunch with my family. I'm vigorously campaigning, inculcating my children in the benefits of a Tory government."

"What we hate, what we fear, is being ignored."

"I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around."

"The proposed ban on incitement to "religious hatred" makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself; and that would be pretty absurd, when you consider that the Bill's intention is to fight Islamophobia."

"I'm backing David Cameron's campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest."

"I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn't go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar."

"I lost the job, but the well the honest truth is that this has been embellished by, probably by me, in the sense that there were two of us who were taken on as trainees, and this was in the, the, the 80s, I think it was the late 80s, and it was him or me who was going to get the job at the end of, at the end of, eight months or nine months.... It was, it was absolutely, it was mano-a-mano and of course it was him who got it."

"I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I'd listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power."

"I can't remember what my line on drugs is. What's my line on drugs?"

"Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3."

"I'm a rugby player, really, and I knew I was going to get to him, and when he was about two yards away I just put my head down. There was no malice. I was going for the ball with my head, which I understand is a legitimate move in soccer."

"Not only did I want Bush to win, but we threw the entire weight of The Spectator behind him."

"Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase... Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms: Chinese concert pianists are technically brilliant, but brilliant at Schubert and Rachmaninov. Chinese ballerinas dance to the scores of Diaghilev. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, although there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech... It is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by Britain, including ping-pong, I'll have you know, which originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called whiff-whaff. The Chinese have a script so fiendishly complicated that they cannot produce a proper keyboard for it."

"For 10 years we in the Tory party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour party."

"I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I'm sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity like the rest of us... I am happy to add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology."

"I've got a brilliant new strategy, which is to make so many gaffes that nobody knows which one to concentrate on. [...] They cease to be newsworthy, you completely out-general the media in that way, and they despair. [...] You shell them, you pepper the media... you've got to pepper their positions with so many gaffes that they're confused. It's like a helicopter throwing out chaff, and then you steal on quietly and drop your depth charges wherever you want to drop them."

"The real hero of Jaws is the mayor. A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open. OK, in that instance he was actually wrong. But in principle, we need more politicians like the mayor - we are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense which is really a massive conspiracy against the taxpayer."

"The world's population is now 6.7 billion, roughly double what it was when I was born. If I live to be in my mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in my lifetime. The UN last year revised its forecasts upwards, predicting that there will be 9.2 billion people by 2050, and I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this impending calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves."

"[O]ver the years, the argument changed, and certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of overall human fertility — global motherhood — has become more or less banned."

"All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn't it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?"

"Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb."

"[On attempting to find any reason to oppose Barack Obama] In the end I gave up, goggle-eyed and exhausted, having trolled the wilds of the Neocon internet without finding anything remotely approaching a smoking gun."

"Had it been us staging the Games, I don't think we would necessarily have done the switcheroo with the girl with the braces"

"My policy on cake is still pro having it and pro eating it!"

"Thank you very much Mr Meyer, Anthony Meyer that is. I want to thank you, I want to thank the police of course, and my wife Marina and my family, and my utterly brilliant campaign team, the Conservative GLA candidates — some of whom were extremely unlucky tonight — and of course the thousands of Conservative activists, the ward captains and knocker-uppers who did such an amazing job today, and indeed yesterday, rather."