My mobile phone battery runs out all the time because all the messages come straight to me.

The thing about politics is to plan 10 years ahead, and assume every year is your last.

I set myself one task, which was to get Labour on to the front foot, back in the game, making the weather on the economy, and that’s going to take me a year.

You could get a cheer by saying: ‘Let’s withdraw from Afghanistan’, but I don’t think that’s where the public’s at. It wouldn’t be responsible.

I don’t think I’ve ever sent a text to Gordon Brown because I’m confident that he would absolutely have no idea how to receive it. He barely managed to master WordPerfect 4.1.

For the first time I’m free to be myself.

Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, and I am pleased he is no longer running Iraq. But the war was wrong.

I’m a very loyal person and I allowed myself to be defined as somebody who was doing Gordon’s bidding. I should have fought back harder to define myself at an earlier stage.

In 1925, when Britain went back to the gold standard, that was supported by the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Bank of England, the civil service, the CBI, the TUC, the Times, the Economist;...

We have come to the edge of the abyss and now it is time for a bold step forward. There is a political view that the tougher you are, the more credible you are.

It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn’t have prosecuted the war. We shouldn’t have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error...

I would love to go on ‘MasterChef’. But while I really like cooking, I’m doubtful anyone would ever want to pay for what I’d cooked.

I think three or four years ago, people would have said my biggest weakness was that sometimes I was awkward on television, with my stammer, but I think they’d say that much less now.