Quotes

It is a sad fact of journalism that people only tell you your stuff is any good after you have stopped writing it.

[on Paul Foot]: For those who find it hard to understand how anyone can claim to believe in workers' power without being a fool or a rogue, I produce Footie as my first exhibit. He is clever and funny and kind. Obviously, there is a screw loose somewhere, but we all have our oddities.

[writing in 1991}: Looking back over my career to date, and at all the people I have insulted, I am mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist.

[on the Jeremy Thorpe case]: I found myself genuinely indignant that murder was to be reintroduced as a means to political advancement for the first time since the Tudors.

[after the acquittal of Jeremy Thorpe on a charge of conspiracy to murder in 1979]: How could it have occurred to any of us for a moment that Thorpe was anything but innocent? Speaking for myself, I think it may have been something to do with the double-breasted waistcoats he wears. At my school, prefects were allowed to wear these absurd garments as a badge of office. So many of them were hypocrites, sodomites and criminal psychopaths that I understandably jumped to the conclusion that Jeremy Thorpe might just possibly be one, too.