quotes of the week

You are about to obliterate the professional classes' representation in the Commons. It is a dangerous game.

Alan Duncan MP to Lord Nolan

The Dirt Book was just a little book in which you had to write down varying things that you knew or heard about people.

Viscount Whitelaw, chief whip in the 1960s, confirming the existence of a book that recorded details of the private lives of Conservative MPs

From now on, the car of the President of the Republic, like the ministers', will stop at red lights.

Jacques Chirac, president of France, warning colleagues that in future senior politicians must set an example.

I've met several errant Ministers and they're not really such bad chaps.

Peter Paterson reviewing "The Politician's Wife" in the Daily Mail

Britain, one constitutionalist declared in the 19th century, could never be ruined but by her Parliament. That remains true today.

Vernon Bogdanor, Reader in Government at Oxford University

The ever-increasing transfer of power to quangos in Wales has been nothing short of a disgrace. More and more areas of life run by committees stuffed full of Tory placemen and women. Tony Blair, Labour leader

To see us as a bunch of red revolutionaries trying to overthrow the established norms of the House of Commons is bluntly preposterous. Professor Anthony King, member of the Nolan committee