I was left £50 when I was ten by a fairly distant cousin, which my father invested in GEC shares on my behalf. I became interested in the market and was given some more shares by my father, which is when I began looking to see how the shares were performing and learning how to read company reports, balance sheets, and so on in order to gauge that."

The appetite of the British people for a long-term involvement in another Middle Eastern conflict could not be weaker. There is no wish to have any further long-term obligations of a military kind that do not affect the most direct national interest.

I'm not interested in the past, I'm interested in the future. Europe is past.

It is of considerable importance that politicians stick to their commitments or do not make such commitments in the first place.

Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.

You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.

I love politics, but I wouldn't want to be involved in it. Too little money, too much work!

When I was the finance minister, I got on well with the RBI Governor.