Counterpoints

“Some doctors have an intuitive rapport. For others it’s a work in progress.”

“The top of the bookmark juts out from the pages of my copy of The Woodlanders like a tombstone marking the mortal remains of any hope I ever held of finishing the thing.”

“Michael Gove’s Wild Animals in Circuses Bill appears at first glance to be nothing more than his latest essay in exhibitionistic compassion. But is it a misreading to ascribe this picayune law-making to opportunistic big-heartedness?”

“At one point Norman Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper both agreed to record a party political broadcast for UKIP which I had founded and led. Norman was too drunk to record his lines and Trevor-Roper had such dreadful toothache that he could not either. I still have that video with six failed attempts at speech by both of them”

“60 per cent of coppers are used only once before being consigned to a piggy bank. Clearly, few can bear to feel their pockets weighed down with coins of such small worth”

“Patrick Kavanagh wrote about an Ireland that “froze for want of Europe”. He was thinking of an Ireland that history had removed from the mainstream of European culture”

“Greggs was supposed to be safe from the liberal metropolitan elite. The vegan sausage roll showed that it wasn’t”

“Some doctors have an intuitive rapport. For others it’s a work in progress.”

“The top of the bookmark juts out from the pages of my copy of The Woodlanders like a tombstone marking the mortal remains of any hope I ever held of finishing the thing.”

“Michael Gove’s Wild Animals in Circuses Bill appears at first glance to be nothing more than his latest essay in exhibitionistic compassion. But is it a misreading to ascribe this picayune law-making to opportunistic big-heartedness?”

“At one point Norman Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper both agreed to record a party political broadcast for UKIP which I had founded and led. Norman was too drunk to record his lines and Trevor-Roper had such dreadful toothache that he could not either. I still have that video with six failed attempts at speech by both of them”

“60 per cent of coppers are used only once before being consigned to a piggy bank. Clearly, few can bear to feel their pockets weighed down with coins of such small worth”

“Patrick Kavanagh wrote about an Ireland that “froze for want of Europe”. He was thinking of an Ireland that history had removed from the mainstream of European culture”

“Greggs was supposed to be safe from the liberal metropolitan elite. The vegan sausage roll showed that it wasn’t”

“Without a way of visualising and recording our spoken words, our world would not be the same”

When I was a precocious Young Conservative, people were most willing to tell me they disagreed with me and I thrived on it. But how much of a challenge does Greta Thunberg have from her classmates or teachers?

Where are Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and George Osborne? It was as if they couldn’t wait to leave Parliament, having got what they could out of the system, with no thought of putting something back

Was Her Majesty waiting behind the scenes in Westminster, ready to provide her Royal Assent to the EU Withdrawal Act? The reality is more mundane

If there is an art to writing after three courses and wine, I never mastered it. But now that the long, boozy lunch is endangered, I’m having serious second thoughts

The long-awaited sequel to A Very British Coup

“The dispute over Parkfield’s “No Outsiders” scheme shows that some people are eager for the state to take over”