Words matter. These are the best Kwasi Kwarteng Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think interventions tend to be wrong. That doesn’t mean to say that every intervention has been a disaster, but it does mean that generally they tend to screw up.
One good outcome of elections is that fresh talent comes into the House of Commons.
Any book on empire will omit, by necessity, vast tracts of the imperial experience, and so critics can easily find facts and details to contradict an author’s bold generalisations.
The contrast between a figure such as Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire before he was 30, and Alfred Krupp, who spent 60 years building one of the biggest manufacturing concerns in the world, is striking.
Aspiration, opportunity, and a stake in society are things which combine education, decent healthcare and the fruits of a capitalist system where individuals contribute to society, while also pursuing their natural inclination to improve their lot in life.
In Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Angola and Cameroon maize is a staple, yet the earliest mention of maize in west Africa comes from a Portuguese document that lists it as being loaded on to slave ships bound for Africa.
Mrs Thatcher not only made history by becoming Britain’s first female prime minister, she was the first woman to hold any comparable position in the western world.
In fact, the fast-changing, dynamic character of London makes perpetual Labour domination unlikely. Things are so fast-moving it would be impossible to say what the situation might look like in five years, let alone 10 or 15.
We are often told that capitalism is in crisis, but look around the world and you’ll see that it has never been so buoyant.
The name Noel Skelton is largely forgotten today, but his legacy in the Conservative Party in the 20th century was enormous.
Cutting VAT is a classic case of shutting the stable door, when the horse has already galloped a couple of furlongs down the road.
If you are a borrower, the more you borrow, the more it costs.
Conservatives should never be shy in promoting a strong case for individual enterprise. We should acknowledge where the system doesn’t work, and seek to amend it.
The extent to which lawyers and judges are interfering in politics is something that concerns many people.
Clearly, for capitalism to work properly we must expect some upward normalisation of interest rates at some future point, to provide greater incentive for savers to save and investors to invest.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to assume that what seems so obvious at one moment in time is a hard, perpetual fact of life.
I don’t see how a lowering of VAT helps much, in terms of stimulus. VAT is a form of sales tax. It gets paid when you spend. A stimulus should put money in your pocket before you have actually spent the money.
Of all the meals that represented British culture, perhaps none captured the imagination more than the Christmas pudding. It was the Victorians who firmly fixed the traditional plum pudding as a festive dish.
Using food as a way of understanding empire is highly effective. Food knows no barriers of race, gender or even time.
From the start of her leadership of the Conservative party in February 1975, Thatcher’s style seemed shrill and uncompromising, and she became an easy object of mockery. When she left office nearly 16 years later, she was a widely recognised, but clearly still highly controversial, figure.
In our media-driven age, the mere fact of having name recognition is a big advantage. When the leadership election was confined only to Conservative MPs, relatively obscure figures could emerge quickly.
Mansa Musa never spoke in public, and whispered everything to an interpreter; he was also never allowed to be seen eating a meal.
History is of all subjects the one which is most engaged with people’s perceptions of themselves, identity, politics, all those things which shape the modern world.
I remember being told after the 1992 general election that Labour could never win a majority in Britain ever again.
The idea that historians aren’t affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.
