I don’t think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran.

Labour have been listening for too long to the so-called experts who think that competition is a dirty word and that communicating facts to our children is elitist.

Inspiring scenes of people taking the future of their countries into their own hands will ignite greater demands for good governance and political reform elsewhere in the world, including in Asia and in Africa.

We hope that the long darkness through which the Burmese people have lived may now be coming to an end.

The EU is not a country and it’s not going to become a country, in my view, now or ever in the future. It is a group of countries working together.

You can gain in your effectiveness as a politician from a wide acquaintance with the world and from a degree of independence that having some outside interests gives.

You can see over time whether people are prepared to differ or not.

The EU should be concentrated on adapting to globalisation and global competitiveness, not building more powerful centralised institutions in Brussels.

I’m not, nor is anybody I know in government part of a nasty right wing clique.

We’re not getting involved in terms of sending ground forces into Libya. Let’s be clear about that. And indeed the UN Resolution forbids that. It says no foreign occupation of any part of Libya.

Governments that use violence to stop democratic development will not earn themselves respite forever. They will pay an increasingly high price for actions which they can no longer hide from the world with ease, and...

When you reduce taxes on higher earners it’s vital to be reducing them on lower earning people as well so the nation shares in the approach.

Ambition is best tempered with self-knowledge!

I know people are fickle.

I still agree with the invasion of Iraq. I don’t agree with most of the decisions that accompanied it.

To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you’ve been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.

If some of the people who write about mojo came with me for a week, they would drop dead on their feet.

If there’s one thing above all that sets me apart from Tony Blair it is this – I am not embarrassed to articulate the instincts of the British people.

Syria should not belong to one family, to one coterie, or to one party. It belongs to all the people of Syria equally, in all their religious and ethnic diversity.

We are not directly involved in Syria. But we will be working with our partners in the European Union and at the United Nations to see if we can persuade the Syrian authorities to go,...

You do have to do business with and to try to influence people you don’t agree with, or find disagreeable, so it’s important to stress that balance.

I don’t think my principles change. I think the way in which you apply those principles to modern society changes.

I’ve always been opposed myself to prisoners having the vote.

I have found that I get a better reaction from people once I am less bothered about their reaction.

There is no budget for travel for a Shadow Foreign Secretary.

We are making progress militarily, there is no doubt about that. You’ve seen the reports from Misrata, although reports of the Gaddafi forces completely pulling out of Misrata seem to be exaggerated.

The appalling crackdown that we witnessed in Hama and other Syrian cities on 30 and 31 July only erode the regime’s legitimacy and increase resentment. In the absence of an end to the senseless violence...

The people of Britain want a Home Secretary who will give them back their streets. They want a Home Secretary who will speak up for the victim, not the criminal.

I have always thought that foreign-policy idealism has to be tempered with realism.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a watertight law designed to catch the guilty, rather than a press release law designed to catch the headlines?

It is the mission of the next Conservative Government to build the Responsible Society.

When we have a Deputy Prime Minister who tells people not to drive cars but has two Jags himself, and where the Minister who tells people not to have two homes turns out to have...

Whatever happens in Mogadishu, in Somalia, will happen in Great Britain. We have interlocking interests.

Well, if you’re looking for me to lead a normal representative life, well good luck finding a foreign secretary who’d be like that – totally dependant on the political system and has never earned any...

Time is not on Gaddafi’s side. People ask about the exit strategy. It’s Colonel Gaddafi who needs an exit strategy because this pressure will only mount and it will be intensified over the coming days...