"Further Education should be about the ability to learn, not the ability to pay - everyone who is able should have the opportunity, regardless of their family background. I don't want to see students struggling with huge debts or frightened off even going to university in the first place."

"I should do something about the cigarettes I quite accept that it's bad for your health, but you know a moderate tipple is positively beneficial and, at certain times, absolutely essential."

"I am genuinely not an over-the-top kind of person about politics or anything else."

"The one thing we can all be sure about in politics is you are as well to expect the unexpected."

"I started running around my 30th birthday. I wanted to lose weight I didn't anticipate the serenity. Being in motion, suddenly my body was busy and so my head could work out some issues I had swept under a carpet of wine and cheese. Good therapy, that's a good run."

"A transfer of money should never be involved in this profound situation. Although illness is profound, too, but medicine's a business today. It's a business."

"Do you suppose there is any living man so unreasonable that if he found himself stricken with a dangerous ailment he would not anxiously desire to regain the blessing of health?"

"I would support a devolution of power out of Washington for education, health care, transportation."