Anthony Lenaghan

“Perhaps only one who leads a political party in the British Parliamentary system can fully appreciate the magnitude of your victory and the skill required to achieve it,’ wrote Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of Canada.12”
― Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Three: Herself Alone

“I was pleased to keep Britain in Europe and to prevent the Conservative Party from splitting. To do so I took a lot of criticism that the old pro-European Harold Macmillan would have understood. Selwyn Lloyd, once Macmillan’s foreign secretary, recalled him saying on his sickbed in 1963 that ‘Balfour had been bitterly criticised for not having a view on Protection and Free Trade. Balfour had said the important thing was to preserve the unity of the Conservative Party. He had been abused for that. But who argues now about protection and free trade? When was the last time the conventional arguments were exchanged? 1923? Whereas the preservation of great national institutions had been the right policy. Lloyd George might have been clear-cut on policy, but he destroyed the Liberal Party.’ The day may come when a similar judgement is made on the single currency.”
― John Major, John Major: The Autobiography

“There are black-letter lawyers and lawyers who bring a greater measure of inventiveness to their task. There are activist lawyers and those who believe that the law should impose as little as possible on human affairs. There are instinctive believers in legal solutions and instinctive sceptics. The intensely deliberative nature of judicial decision-making, at any rate at the appellate level, usually irons out the grosser personal idiosyncracies. However, most of the problems with which lawyers have to deal are not about law at all. They are about fact and evidence. Lawyers are formed by experience to analyse complex factual issues in which they have no pre-existing expertise, often concerned with arcane scientific, economic or statistical concepts. It is a valuable discipline.”
― Jonathan Sumption, Law in a Time of Crisis