[when asked in 2009 whether he would have made a good prime minister if he had stood for the Labour leadership against James Callaghan in the 1970s] "I probably would. But it is better for people to wonder why I wasn't prime minister than to wonder why I was."
As prime minister she was bad, without any question, but when I got to know her as a human being I found she had quite attractive qualities. One felt rather sorry for her because she was quite fragile. (On Margaret Thatcher)
[In 1978, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, replying in the House of Commons to a speech in which Geoffrey Howe, the Shadow Chancellor, censured him] "That part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep".