“They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”

My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.

Never in my life did I think I would be congratulated by Mick Jagger for achieving anything.

I lead a life of blameless domesticity and always have done.

We did everything we could to break down barriers that restrain poorest.

Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It’s time for a rethink, and the Tory party – the funkiest, most jiving party on Earth – is where it’s happening.

Do you seriously propose that they are going to be so insane as to allow tariffs to be imposed. The EU is, I’m afraid a job destroying engine. You can see it all across southern Europe, you can see it, alas, in our country.

I think the risks that people see of terrorism are incredibly important but we are very confident we have got the right people on it and the risks have been minimised.

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.

I don’t believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.

When Cameron’s Conservatives come to power it will be a golden age for cyclists and an Elysium of cycle lanes, bike racks, and sharia law for bike thieves. And I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity.

Our friends in America will be at the front of the queue for trade deals.

In 1904, 20 per cent of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see a figure like that again. If you can’t turn the clock back to 1904, what’s the point of being a Conservative?

If we judged everybody by the stupid, unguarded things they blurt out to their nearest and dearest, then we wouldn’t ever get anywhere.

Some people think that it [Brexit] is the end of the world. It’s not. On the contrary, it’s a massive opportunity for this country.

All the people I talk to, increasingly, can see that the emperor has got no clothes. The case for leaving [the EU] is now overwhelming.

I would ban sweets from school – but this pressure to bring in healthy food is too much.

We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary.

Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.

I’ve been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I’ve never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I’m not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it’s got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

In the time of Mrs Thatcher the church, to give it its due, spoke out and was an enemy of the Conservative government.

You’re going to start stamping out a lot of things that are going on in football.

Gary Berntsen, head of the CIA in Afghanistan there, he was a field commander. And he has a book out called “Jawbreaker.” And he says we missed an opportunity at Tora Bora to get him.

The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind.