Tim Shipman > Quotes

“There are two sorts of political communications operators in this business. There are people who see the population as they would like them to be, and there are people who see the population, ruthlessly, as they actually are. There is the wishful-thinking element, and there is the winning element.”
― Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

“In the long history of Brexit there were few more surreal evenings than 13 March 2019.”
― Tim Shipman, No Way Out: Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris

“In the Conservative Party, if you constantly feed the crocodiles then they come for you.”
― Tim Shipman, No Way Out: Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris

“Another official added, ‘You just can’t run an international negotiation on the basis of changing your mind every five minutes.”
― Tim Shipman, No Way Out: Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris

“If there is a lesson in this book, it is not that some ideologies are right and that others are wrong, but that success belongs to leaders who build effective teams to pursue clearly defined goals that they can not only explain to the public but also persuade them to support.”
― Tim Shipman, Out

“In the classic outline of a failed coup, the plotters had sought to oust the president without first securing the support of the military and the civil service, and without seizing the headquarters of the state broadcaster.”
― Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

“The mood music was good as Trump showed his serious side in the closed meeting. A Downing Street source said, "He was on top of any number of quite complex briefs and he'd only been president for a week. That impressed Theresa [May] because she's a details girl.”
― Tim Shipman, Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

“Brexit deals tended to be founded on the kind of linguistic circumlocutions and fudge that made Sir Humphrey Appleby Britain’s favourite fictional mandarin.”
― Tim Shipman, Out

“...Andrew Feldman put £2,000 behind the bar, and [David] Cameron told a joke about a farmer inviting a new neighbour to come to his house for a party where there might be dancing, drinking and ‘rough sex’. When the neighbour asks what to wear, the farmer says, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s only going to be you and me.”
― Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

“John McDonnell was a self-declared Marxist whose Who’s Who entry boasted that he was ‘fermenting [sic] the overthrow of capitalism’. McDonnell was on the record as saying, ‘You can’t change the world through the parliamentary system.”
― Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

“The plotters forgot the old adage that those who seek to kill a king had better return with a body.”
― Tim Shipman, Out

“General Lord Ismay, the first head of Nato, had famously joked the alliance’s purpose was to ‘keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down’.”
― Tim Shipman, Out

“If Corbyn was Rocky Balboa, when it mattered – after the manifesto meltdown and in the televised Q&As – Theresa May displayed all the charm and emotional intelligence of his Soviet opponent in Rocky IV, the robotic Ivan Drago played by Dolph Lundgren.”
― Tim Shipman, Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem