Scorn (13 page)

If you vote for Kinnock you're voting against Christ.
Dame Barbara Cartland explaining why British voters should not vote Labour

The Honourable Member for two tube stations.
Nicholas Fairbairn on Frank Dobson (MP for Holborn and St Pancras)

A bull in search of a china shop.
Unnamed union boss on Charles Clarke

Whenever Clare Short wrestles with her conscience, she wins.
Ben Macintyre

The man who takes the weight out of lightweight.
Bruce Anderson on Charles Kennedy

What is that fat gentleman in such a passion about?
Charles Shaw-Lefevre, as a child, hearing Charles James Fox speak in Parliament

They are gnats on an elephant's backside.
John Prescott on workers at New Labour's Millbank HQ, 1997

He loses his temper on Monday and doesn't find it again till Friday.
Anonymous civil servant about John Prescott

Mr Prescott has a mind like knitting the cat has played with.
John Prescott's college tutor

He has the face of a man who clubs baby seals.
Denis Healey on John Prescott

Like a fist fight in a hydrangea bush.
Craig Brown on buxom Dame Jill Knight wearing a floral print

Sir Eric Pickles sounds like a name a particularly eccentric old lady would give her favourite cat.
Martin Francis on Pickles' knighthood

Apart from my own name, the Transpennine Express is the greatest misnomer of all time.
Former transport minister Lord Adonis

Peter Mandelson has the insolent manner of one born to the top rung but three.
Gore Vidal

Having a conversation with Mr Mandelson was rather like
walking down stairs and missing the last step. You were uninjured but remained disconcerted.
Alan Watkins

Like Woody Allen without the jokes.
Simon Hoggart on Sir Keith Joseph

A tango dancer who's opened his legs to President Clinton.
Chinese government description of Chris Patten (last governor of Hong Kong)

There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe.
Gordon Brown to Tony Blair. Attrib.

If we can't take this lot apart in the next few years we shouldn't be in the business of politics at all.
Tony Blair handing over the premiership to Gordon Brown

An analogue politician in a digital age.
David Cameron on Gordon Brown

A tiny dot on this world.
Robert Mugabe on Gordon Brown

The House has noticed the Prime Minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean.
Vince Cable to Gordon Brown

He has the judgement of King Lear, the decisiveness of
Hamlet, the paranoia of Othello, and the loyalty of Brutus. But at least we've got rid of Lady Macbeth.
Bob Marshall-Andrews MP on Gordon Brown, shortly after he became Prime Minister

A Shakespearean tragedy.
Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff, describing Gordon Brown, to Boris Johnson, later Mayor of London. Powell denies the remark.

It doesn't matter how deep your intelligence or convictions, or how ingrained your sense of vocation and election, if you look sick when someone laughs at you, you aren't up to the job.
Howard Jacobson on Gordon Brown

Well that's a lie.
Overheard remark by Cherie Blair on hearing Gordon Brown say he had considered it a privilege to work with Tony Blair. Mrs Blair denies the remark.

A fucking disaster.
Alleged remark by John Hutton, Business Secretary, anticipating Gordon Brown's premiership

At Downing Street upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't Blair.
He wasn't Blair again today.
Oh how I wish he'd go away!
Limerick attributed to a cabinet minister (anonymous) describing Gordon Brown's occupancy of 10 Downing Street

Psychologically flawed.
A ‘source close to' Prime Minister Tony Blair on his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, 1998. Alastair Campbell, Blair's Press Secretary denies the attribution.

He can brighten a room just by leaving it.
Peter Lilley on Gordon Brown

John is John.
Tony Blair on John Prescott

[Tony Blair] doesn't like the full-frontal approach. It puts him off his tea.
John Prescott on Tony Blair

One of the Number Ten mekons.
John Prescott on David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary – a comparison with the big-brained, shrivelled-bodied, green alien dictator in the 1950s
Eagle
comic

A semi-detached member of the Cabinet.
Description of Tory politician John Biffen by Margaret Thatcher's Press Secretary, Bernard Ingham.

The sewer and not the sewerage.
John Biffen on Bernard Ingham

Silly old fucker.
Alastair Campbell on Margaret Thatcher's Press Secretary, Bernard Ingham

A big twat.
Alastair Campbell on Martin Sixsmith, a Whitehall director of communications

A desiccated calculating machine.
Aneurin Bevan, usually regarded as a jibe at Hugh Gaitskell

Nobody ever celebrated Devolution Day.
Alex Salmond

Lady Macbeth.
Boris Johnson on Nicola Sturgeon

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.
Boris Johnson

I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I'm sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity in common with the rest of us … I'm happy to add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology.
Boris Johnson, apologizing for the above remark

An enigma wrapped up in a whoopee cushion.
Will Self on Boris Johnson

A gurgling loaf with a sheepdog's haircut and a repertoire of Latin bum jokes.
Ian Martin on Boris Johnson

We cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.
David Cameron on Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn is the Left's Enoch Powell. His views and stances are equally repugnant … Powell was always at pains to paint himself as someone who did not personally entertain prejudice. He was merely an interlocutor between the body politic and those that did. He did not endorse racism. But he thought it important to engage with those who held such views, to understand them, and provide an outlet for their opinions.

Jeremy Corbyn is the same. Terrorists. Anti-semites. Isil apologists. He doesn't share their views. But he offers himself as a conduit for them. So we can better understand them. Or so he says. And then off he goes, partying with those who chide us not to compare Isil with the Nazis, just as Isil are slipping lethal injections into the arms of disabled children.
Dan Hodges on Jeremy Corbyn

A man of herbivorous ways and carnivorous views.
Peter Hennessy on Jeremy Corbyn

Although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.
E.B. White on the science of polling

 

Peers

I am dead: dead, but in the Elysian fields.
Benjamin Disraeli on his move to the House of Lords. Attrib.

The House of Lords is like heaven – you want to get there some day, but not while there is any life in you.
Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls

They that hated the Bishops hated them worse than the devil, and they that loved them loved them not so well as their dinner.
Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Faulkland on failing to defeat a late-night Lords vote to curtail bishops' voting rights in 1641

The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days.
Clement Attlee. Attrib.

Every man has a House of Lords in his own head. Fears,
prejudices, misconceptions – those are the peers, and they are hereditary.
David Lloyd George

Historical throwbacks and hillbilly inbreds.
Tony McNulty MP on hereditary peers

An ermine-lined dustbin, an up-market geriatric home with a faint smell of urine.
Austin Mitchell MP on the House of Lords

Last week, The Lord jetted in from New York to vote in support of tax credit cuts for the working poor … The last time Webber voted was for same-sex marriage – so he loves gays but hates the poor. Anyone would think The Lord cared only about his audiences.
Bridget Christie on Andrew Lloyd Webber

TIM SAINSBURY: (Seeing Nicholas Soames in his hunting dress) Going rat-catching, Nick?
NICHOLAS SOAMES: Fuck off, you grocer: you don't tell a gentleman how to dress on a Friday.
Exchange in the Palace of Westminster between Nicholas Soames MP, grandson of Winston Churchill, and Tim Sainsbury MP of the supermarket dynasty

When I want a peerage I shall buy one like any honest man.
Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe

Let me be thankful, God, that I am not
A Labour Leader when his life-work ends,
Who contemplates the coronet he got
By being false to principles and friends;
Who fought for forty years a desperate fight
With words that seared and stung and slew like swords,
And at the end, with victory in sight,
Ate them – a mushroom viscount in the Lords.
William Kean Seymour, Viscount Demos

Other people's opinions matter less – unless they're medical.
Baroness Trumpington on the benefits of ageing

 

Australian Politics

He [Joyce] looks somehow inbred with a tomato. It's not a criticism, I'm just saying, I was a little worried … he might explode.
Johnny Depp on Barnaby Joyce MP after the latter had mocked Depp's apology for illegally importing his dogs into Australia

I think I'm turning into Johnny Depp's Hannibal Lecter, aren't I? I'm inside his head, I'm pulling little strings and pulling little levers. Long after I've forgotten about Mr Depp, he's remembering me.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce

A feral calculator.
Paul Keating on John Hewson, 1993 Australian general election

Like being flogged with a warm lettuce.
Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, referring to an attack by the Opposition leader, John Hewson

He's wound up like a thousand-day clock.
The then Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, about his Liberal Party opponent John Howard

What we have is a dead carcass, swinging in the breeze, but nobody will cut it down to replace him.
Paul Keating on John Howard

From this day onwards, Howard will wear his leadership like a crown of thorns and in parliament I will do everything to crucify him.
Paul Keating on John Howard

I am not like the Leader of the Opposition. I did not crawl out of the Cabinet room like a mangy maggot.
Paul Keating on John Howard

I was implying that the Honourable Member was like a lizard on a rock – alive but looking dead.
Paul Keating on John Howard

I suppose that the Honourable Gentleman's hair, like his intellect, will recede into the darkness.
Paul Keating on shadow treasurer Andrew Peacock

It is the first time the Honourable Gentleman has got out from under the sunlamp.
Paul Keating on Andrew Peacock

Just because you swallowed a fucking dictionary when you were about fifteen doesn't give you the right to pour a bucket of shit over the rest of us.
Paul Keating to a member of his Cabinet

What for? Then I'd be like you.
Paul Keating, to Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Whitlam had just said to him ‘that was a good speech. You should go back, comrade, and get yourself an honours degree'.

He schemed, revised history … the king of all larrikins, a coarse auto-didact with a tongue that could clip a hedge.
Conrad Black, owner of the
Daily Telegraph,
on former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating

Now, I know that there are some Aboriginal people who aren't happy with Australia Day. For them it remains Invasion Day. I think a better view is the view of Noel Pearson, who has said that Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British Heritage.
Tony Abbott

[Tony Abbott] stands for nothing. He is the Nancy Reagan of Australian politics without the astrology: say no to everything, just rancid, dripping, relentless negativity.
Defence Materiel Minister Jason Clare

Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail: Small Breasts, Huge Thighs, and a Big Red Box.
Menu item at a Liberal National Party dinner. The menu was widely circulated on social media and caused widespread outrage.

(Mr Abbott) is Gina Rinehart's butler.
Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard

The Leader of the Opposition [then Malcolm Turnbull], faced with the choice of a doberman or poodle, has gone for the poodle.
Julia Gillard compares Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne

Anyone who has chosen to remain deliberately barren … they've got no idea about what life's about.
Senator Bill Heffernan discussing Julia Gillard's fitness for office