Minister of state security Quotes

“Humphrey Well, Prime Minister … one hesitates to say this but there are times when circumstances conspire to create an inauspicious concatenation of events that necessitate a metamorphosis, as it were, of the situation such that what happened in the first instance to be of primary import fraught with hazard and menace can be relegated to a secondary or indeed tertiary position while a new and hitherto unforeseen or unappreciated element can and indeed should be introduced to support and supersede those prior concerns not by confronting them but by subordinating them to the over-arching imperatives and increased urgency of the previously unrealised predicament which may in fact now, ceteris paribus, only be susceptible to radical and remedial action such that you might feel forced to consider the currently intractable position in which you find yourself. Jim is nonplussed. Jim What does he mean, Bernard? Bernard I, um – I, er, think that he’s perhaps suggesting the possibility that you, um, consider your position. Resign, in fact, Prime Minister.”

“Events went on to show that it is not by chance that a prime minister reaches such lofty heights and that, as the infallible wisdom of nations has demonstrated time and time again, each country gets the government it deserves, although it must be said that while it is true to say that prime ministers, for good or ill, are not all the same, it is no less true to say, are all countries.”

“..it must make sense to try & sign up the minister's man, who in the end is the one person who can ensure that you will be awarded the contract. The system seems to work well, & as long as a minister deals only with reputable international firms & doesn't become too greedy, no one complains. Fail to observe either of those two golden rules & the whole house of cards collapses.”

“Now (obviously) a sentence’s truth—even when we hold the sentence’s meaning fixed—depends on which world we are considering. “Brown is Prime Minister” is true in the actual world but, since Brown need not have been Prime Minister, there are countless worlds in which “Brown is Prime Minister” is false: in those worlds, Brown did not succeed Tony Blair, or never went into politics, or never even existed. And in some other worlds, someone else is Prime Minister — David Cameron, P. F. Strawson, me, Madonna, or Daffy Duck. In still others, there is no such office as Prime Minister, or not even a Britain; and so on and so forth. So a given sentence or proposition varies its truth-value from world to world.”

“Finally, the work of the minister tended to be judged by his success in a single area - the saving of souls in measurable numbers. The local minister was judged either by his charismatic powers or by his ability to prepare his congregation for the preaching of some itinerant ministerial charmer who would really awaken its members. The 'star' system prevailed in religion before it reached the theater. As the evangelical impulse became more widespread and more dominant, the selection and training of ministers was increasingly shaped by the revivalist criterion of ministerial merit. The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter. Theological education itself became more instrumental. Simple dogmatic formulations were considered sufficient. In considerable measure the churches withdrew from intellectual encounters with the secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of science alone. By 1853 an outstanding clergyman complained that there was 'an impression, somewhat general, that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety, and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect.”

“He was the first prime minister in a long time who did not have a son or a son-in-law in business or real estate”

“Jim Is there no other way? Claire We could just say no to him. Jim Can’t risk that. Collapse of conference, collapse of backbench support, collapse of Cabinet. Collapse of my career. The biggest disaster since Dunkirk. Humphrey I think not, Prime Minister. Jim Name a bigger one. Humphrey The Freedom of Information Act.”

“...you don't need a calling to minister love...”

“I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.”