“It is virtually impossible for what you are voting on to remain as it is currently. There could be huge changes to the treaty and there could be huge changes to the euro zone itself.”

I have been called a great many things in my time – that’s politics.

I am delighted at Des’s support in these elections. And thank him for his rewrite of the lyrics of Send in the Clowns which we are planning to sing at our South East conference.

British chancellor is telling the rest of Europe it must abandon democracy. It’s appalling.

Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.

I know there’s an online petition to have another referendum [like Brexit] but I think honestly I think if people want to go for it a little further down the line it would be a hiding for nothing.

I think that politics needs a bit of spicing up.

We must break up the eurozone. We must set those Mediterranean countries free.

It’s the FSA and its plethora of EU bodies that’s failed.

Nobody in Britain has voted for 4 million people to come here in the last 15 years, and for probably another 3 million to come between now and 2020.

There are two completely different Britains. There’s London, and there’s the rest of Britain.

The great and the good will decide what is good for us and make sure that we get what is good for us, good and hard.

Minimum sales prices for alcohol are a startlingly bad idea. As with excise duties, the effects are regressive.

It’s a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth.

This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.

Puppet Papademos is in place, and as Athens caught fire on Sunday night he rather took my breath away – he said violence and destruction have no place in a democratic country.

If an idea is indeed sensible, it will eventually become just part of the accepted wisdom.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go.

It seems only reasonable that the people have a right to know virtually everything about the personality they are buying each time they put their money through the box office

Virtually every major shift in cultural history can trace its origins to the work of a small group, often gathered around an innovative thinker or body of thought.

In the ’80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear – that if I didn’t, people would soon forget about me.

The “patron saint” of Japanese quality control, ironically, is an American named W. Edwards Deming, who was virtually unknown in his own country until his ideas of quality control began to make such a big impact on Japanese companies.

The physicality of a real relationship – one that encompasses mind, body and soul – ultimately makes it more fulfilling and powerful than any virtual relationship ever could be.

The fame which is based on wealth or beauty is a frail and fleeting thing; but virtue shines for ages with undiminished lustre.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.