Many of the things I've said have been controversial. When I defended lesbian and gay rights in 1981, we were denounced. When we said we needed to negotiate with the IRA, we were denounced. The simple fact is: show me what I got wrong in those times. I was just prepared to challenge the bigotry of the day. I'm prepared to challenge bigotry today.

What I said is true. Hitler [Adolf Hitler] supported Zionism. Anyone who can prove what I said isn't true, I'll take them out to the best dinner of their lives. Oddly enough, no one's come up with it. I came into politics to tell the truth.

I grew up in South London: if someone was rude to you, you were rude back to them. I didn't go to Eton and get all that smarmy charming education, I'm afraid.

I don't mind a bit of personal abuse and I've occasionally done some myself.

Everything that is wrong in society - drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, crime - is directly related to inequality of wealth.

I think Margaret Thatcher is a severely damaged individual. She had a grim childhood, cold baths, discipline, order. There was no happy childhood there, and that's the case with most people who are political monsters. But, when she dies she's just another human being who dies. If we could go back and prevent her being born, that'd be a different matter, we'd all have been saved, but if it hadn't been Thatcher it would most probably have been Tebbit (Norman Tebbit), someone would have come up and done the same.

Thatcher (Margaret Thatcher) so divided society that you were one side or the other, there was no middle ground.

If you look at the history of the Post War world, in 1945 a Labour government and also the Truman administration following on from Roosevelt, set in place 30 years of Social Democracy, wealth differential was narrowed and lifespan improved. In the 1970s everyone said things were terrible, it wasn't, it was a bloody wonderful time. Womens' wages caught up with mens massively, the length of holidays went from two weeks to three or four, the average working day was cut by 40 minutes and crime levels were nothing compared to now. It was in a sense a much fairer society. And then Thatcher (Margaret Thatcher) came in here and Reagan (Ronald Reagan) in America and wrenched it into rebuilding inequalities of wealth, huge profits to corporations, and there were going to be casualties. And we're still suffering. When Cameron (David Cameron) talks about a Broken Britain he's right, but quite a lot of it he's not being honest with admitting who broke it.

[in 2009] It used to be politics was a serious debate about the issues. Increasingly, it's "Are they good-looking? Would you like to sit next to them at a dinner party?" The two politicians who most changed the last sixty years are Clem Attlee (Clement Attlee), who people didn't even know he was in the room but he was hard as nails in doing the job, and Margaret Thatcher. No one liked Margaret Thatcher but they respected her. Now we've got to like politicians.