Dennis Skinner

“If I am doing a speech at a Labour party meeting - I think I have done every constituency - I'll look for a happy face, and talk to that face. In the Commons, with all the anger, I'll fix on a blank panel above their heads.”

“Parties are organised happiness but happiness is accidental. You can't legislate for it.”

“I do rely on my instincts a lot and my imagination.”

“When I swapped studying for a wage and a proper job, Mam and Dad were devastated. I was rejecting an opportunity they never had. But their eldest son, at 16, wanted only to follow his father down the pit. It was to be the biggest education of my life.”

“I don't believe in organised happiness.”

“Environment does shape you. My environment, in a pit family, in a pit village, with nine kids in total.”

“We dragged the National Health Service from the depths of degradation. I've got a United Nations heart bypass to prove it and it was done by a Syrian cardiologist, a Malaysian surgeon, a Dutch doctor and a Nigerian registrar.”