Quotes

In December I'll be in Beijing, opening up new pork markets!

We import two thirds of our cheese. That is a disgrace.

We Liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all. We do not believe people are born to rule.

We're living in a kind of Purgatory at the moment.

We're one of the best Countries in the World to be Black, a Woman or LGBT.

We need to win. And we will win against Keir Starmer who is a Patronising Plastic Patriot!

[on the First Minister of Wales] We'll be able to take on the low energy version of Jeremy Corbyn that is Mark Drakeford.

[on the First Minister of Scotland] The best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is ignore her. She's an attention seeker, that's what she is.

[asked whether she regarded the French President as a friend or foe] The jury is out.

[Goes quiet and glares. Applause.]

I am a fighter and not a quitter.

When we were in office, we did not dismantle the Blairite state. That was our big failing. Not getting rid of the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, the Constitutional Reform Act. That's what we should have done.

I think we need an entirely new senior civil service to run Britain. And I don't think the Conservatives are there yet. They're still defending the Bank of England, they're still defending the Office of Budget Responsibility. These are two of the institutions that have been completely captured.

All of the left need to be taken on. It's not just about the Climate Change Act, or the Equality Act. Both of those need to be repealed. But it's also all the power that was given to the judiciary, the creation of the Supreme Court, it's the power that was given to the Bank of England and the Office of Budget Responsibility. All of this power needs to be taken back in order for the right to be able to succeed. And that's something both Reform and the Conservatives need to acknowledge.

The day before the budget, the Bank of England announced the sale of 80 billion pounds worth of government gilts. They'd previously been printing money, doing quantitative easing. They started quantitative tightening the day before. This was a deliberate attempt to undermine the government. And then when that exposed the failures of the Bank of England to properly regulate the pensions market, the LDI crisis, there was a run in the markets, and the Bank of England pointed the figure at us.

We don't just have people on the left that are misguided. We have people on the left who are out there to sabotage what we are trying to do. Our government, our state, is run by people who are ideologically opposed to what we are trying to do. So the biggest problem is not what the policies should be. The biggest problem is how on Earth do you get those policies done when you've got people who are allegedly working for you that are deliberately undermining you.

If the budget had held, we would have had lower corporation tax, lower welfare spending, duty free would be restored in London. The economy would be in a much better position now. We've had the counterfactual of putting up taxes. What's happened? The debt's gone up. Why has the debt gone up? Because all of the businesses have left Britain, they've closed down. So we've actually got higher debt with what the Blob wanted, rather than my proposals.

The left have been infiltrating our institutions for years. For years and years and years. If you look at DEI in the police and how that arose, that was there even before the Macpherson Inquiry. You had people pushing for that agenda, the institutional racism agenda, the DEI agenda, before Macpherson. And they used that report as an opportunity to push their agenda. And the right were nowhere. They weren't trying to influence the police, they weren't trying to infiltrate the civil service.

[on Ann Widdecombe] She was a deeply principled politician who stood for the very values we are fighting for at CPAC: free speech, patriotism and the family. She was courageous and fearless in standing up to the leftist drift we have seen in Britain.