Prime minister Quotes

“Humphrey Not another czar, please, Prime Minister. In the last three years we’ve appointed an Enterprise Czar, a Youth-Crime Czar, a Welfare Supremo, a Pre-School Supremo, an Unemployment Watchdog, a Banking Regulator, a Science and Technology Supremo and a Community Policing Czar. If you go on like this you won’t need a Cabinet. Jim Perfect! Humphrey Perfect? Prime Minister, we even have a Twitter Czar! Bernard His appointment was announced as a Tweet. Humphrey What’s he supposed to achieve? Jim The same as the others: at least twelve column inches in every paper.”

“Humphrey Not another czar, please, Prime Minister. In the last three years we’ve appointed an Enterprise Czar, a Youth-Crime Czar, a Welfare Supremo, a Pre-School Supremo, an Unemployment Watchdog, a Banking Regulator, a Science and Technology Supremo and a Community Policing Czar. If you go on like this you won’t need a Cabinet. Jim Perfect! Humphrey Perfect? Prime Minister, we even have a Twitter Czar! Bernard His appointment was announced as a Tweet. Humphrey What’s he supposed to achieve? Jim The same as the others: at least twelve column inches in every paper.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The Prime Minister gazed hopelessly at the pair of them for a moment, then the words he had fought to suppress all evening burst from him at”

“Surprise is when a prime minister is assassinated during his speech. Suspense is when an assassin lurks while the prime minister speaks. Balancing surprise and suspense is the job of the thriller writer.”

“As Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak have repeatedly said, the intelligence and security relationship between the United States and Israel at present is unprecedented. It has never been stronger.”

“While security of national leadership is of paramount significance, expenditure on permanent civil structures at the family home of the prime minister and chief minister from public exchequer will be a burden on their conscience.”