Daniel Hannan

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around 20,000 pounds. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. ”

A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. ”

Conservatives the world over need to grasp the difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes the two positions happen to coincide; often they don't. ”

There is sort of a hobbit-like element to a lot of British people. They don't want to be told something until they have worked it out for themselves. ”

It's not often one gets the chance to write this but, when it comes to the bailouts, especially the euro bailouts, Marxists are right. Working people are being forced to support a privileged few. ”

Foreign writers - especially Germans - often feel that Shakespeare is really one of them, that he was somehow accidentally born in the wrong country. In much the same way, leftists sense in their bones that he was a radical, rightists that he was a Tory. ”

I am, 'Guardian' readers keep telling me, a xenophobe. Never mind that I speak French and Spanish, that I love Europe, that I've lived a high proportion of my life abroad. The fact that I oppose the political amalgamation of the European Union's states is ipso facto proof that I dislike foreigners. ”

I think public life for me has a slightly didactic role, OK. ”

The populists always fail in their own terms. Let me be more specific, the protectionists always fail. They always end up delivering the sharpest fall in living standards to the people who are their biggest supporters. ”

In my experience, Eurosceptics are likelier to have lived abroad and to have entered fully into other cultures than Euro-enthusiasts, many of whom seem to have latched on to the E.U. as a way of compensating for their poor language skills. ”