Ken Clarke

British politician (born 1940)

Kenneth Harry Clarke, Baron Clarke of Nottingham (born 2 July 1940) is a British politician who served as Home Secretary from 1992 to 1993 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1993 to 1997 as well as serving as deputy chair of British American Tobacco from 1998 to 2007. A member of the Conservative Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for Rushcliffe from 1970 to 2019 and was Father of the House of Commons between 2017 and 2019. The President of the Tory Reform Group since 1997, he is a one-nation conservative who identifies with economically and socially liberal views.

Ken Clarke as Justice Secretary

Quotes

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1990s

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2000s

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  • We are all in agreement about the principles of the national health service ...it should be provided free at the point of treatment, according to clinical need and largely funded out of taxation.
    • Speech in the House of Commons (11 October 2006) in a debate on NHS workforce and service development.

2010s

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  • When we negotiate trade agreements in the future, we will be pressing other countries to open up their public procurement processes to genuine, fair, international competition. It would be totally ridiculous to abandon that principle now to give into not only constituency pressures, which I understand, but otherwise nationalist nonsense that ought to be ignored.
    • Speech in the House of Commons (26 March 2018) on the awarding of the contract for the production of new UK passports to Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto
  • If a Brexiteer majority still wishes to persist in leaving, once we have made some progress and it’s obvious we’re getting there, you can invoke Article 50 again and leave fairly rapidly. To me, that seems the only rational way in which we can precede. But common sense has gone out of the window.
  • [On Margaret Thatcher] She was a bizarre character. She was one of the most unlikely human beings I ever met.
    If you'd told me that this woman would become Prime Minister, I mean no dislike of her at all, I'd have thought that was ridiculous.
  • No one has officially told me that I have lost the Tory whip. The fault’s probably mine. I’m notorious for only using my mobile phone for outgoing calls: nobody knows my London number and I certainly don’t do anything online. So there may somewhere be an email or text message or something telling me, but I gather from the media that there’s no doubt that I’ve lost the whip. My status otherwise is completely unclear.
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