A collection of political insults

Politics is a contact sport and participants sometimes let loose with invective: the best insults are clever, shocking and/or contain an uncomfortable element of truth

We’re almost at the end of the general election campaign in the United Kingdom, though France limps on till Sunday for the second round of its elections for the National Assembly, and the United States has another four months of trench warfare until it chooses a new/old president. Democracy and debate, argument and conflict go hand-in-hand, which is mostly a good, healthy thing: I do believe courtesy is important in public discourse but politics shouldn’t be boring and sometimes disagreements are real, profound and visceral.

This is not a golden age of invective: “Sleepy Joe”, “Tory scum”, “Captain Crasheroonie Snoozefest”. While British politics is still (relatively) polite and orderly, you rarely hear a genuinely sharp, finely crafted barb or witticism. On the other hand, some are repeated in anthologies and “bathroom books” endlessly, sometimes inaccurately, and have lost the power of novelty: Churchill and Lloyd George lead the pack of political wits. In an attempt to keep readers’ spirits up as we battle through the summer, I have culled some hopefully lesser known, surprising and perhaps amusing insults and slurs which you can browse at leisure. Or not. Up to you. I have tried to verify them, as a lot of quotations are “attributed”, but some may have slipped through the net.

“Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstone—extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and superstition; and with one commanding characteristic—whether Prime Minister, or Leader of Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying, or scribbling—never a gentleman!” Benjamin Disraeli writing to the Earl of Derby, October 1876

“[Lord] Curzon is an intolerable person to do business with—pompous, dictatorial and outrageously conceited... really he is an intolerable person, pig-headed, pompous and vindictive too! Yet an able, strong man with it all.” Maurice Hankey, 12 May 1916

“When they circumcised Herbert Samuel they threw away the wrong bit.” David Lloyd George, c 1918

“A government of the second XI.” Winston Churchill on Andrew Bonar Law’s new cabinet, October 1922

“We have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by the side of the Unknown Soldier.” H.H. Asquith at Andrew Bonar Law’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, 5 November 1923

“Don’t you think it is because he is a bore?” A.J. Balfour asked why Austen Chamberlain had never become prime minister, c 1930

“The Right Honourable Gentleman has sat for so long on the fence that the iron has entered his soul.” David Lloyd George on Sir John Simon, 1931

“How could they tell?” Dorothy Parker on the death of Calvin Coolidge, January 1933

“He has the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.” Winston Churchill on Ramsay MacDonald, 1933

“Listening to a speech by [Neville] Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth’s, everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.” Aneurin Bevan, date unknown

“The Stanleys have been trimmers since Bosworth Field.” Viscountess Cranborne on Oliver Stanley’s failure to resign with Anthony Eden and her husband, February 1938

“I can tell you this, you utterly contemptible little shit. On every morning that you wake up for the rest of your life, you will be ashamed of what you did last night.” David Margesson to John Profumo after the Norway Debate, 10 May 1940

“As far as I can see you have used every cliché except ‘God is Love’ and ‘Please adjust your dress before leaving’.” Winston Churchill returning a memo to Anthony Eden, 1940

“Unless the right hon. Gentleman changes his policy and methods and moves without the slightest delay, he will be as great a curse to this country in time of peace, as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war.” Winston Churchill on Aneurin Bevan, 6 December 1945

“For seventeen years, he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.” Harold Nicolson on George V, 17 August 1949

“There are three sorts of people in this party: shits, bloody shits and fucking shits.” Edward Heath on the Conservative Party, c 1955

“He has been too clever by half… it is not considered immoral, or even bad form, to outwit one’s opponents at bridge… the Colonial Secretary, when he abandoned the sphere of bridge for the sphere of politics, brought his bridge technique with him.” The Marquess of Salisbury on Iain Macleod, 7 March 1961

“A kind of bellicose Bertie Wooster without even a Jeeves to restrain him.” Michael Foot on the Earl of Home, 2 November 1961

“I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.” Harry Truman on Douglas MacArthur, c 1962

“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.” Jeremy Thorpe on Harold Macmillan’s cabinet reshuffle, 13 July 1962

“A great party is not to be brought down because of a squalid affair between a woman of easy virtue and a proven liar.” Viscount Hailsham on John Profumo, 13 June 1963

“I must say that he never struck me as a man at all like a cloistered monk; and Miss Keeler was a professional prostitute.” Nigel Birch on John Profumo, 17 June 1963

“No, no, Jimmy Stewart for governor; Ronald Reagan for his best friend.” Jack Warner on hearing that Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California, January 1966

“There is nobody in politics I can remember and no case I can think of in history where a man combined such a powerful political personality with so little intelligence.” Roy Jenkins on James Callaghan, 5 September 1969

“He was good company and a good raconteur, and those who met him imagined that he was relaxing away from his desk. However they did not realise that there was no desk.” Terence O’Neill on Sir Basil Brooke, Viscount Brookeborough, 20 August 1973

“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Tom Lehrer, c October 1973

“Roy’s drawl always lengthens when he is angry, which heightens the effect of contempt.” Barbara Castle on Roy Jenkins, 5 April 1974

“If you chose Keith [Joseph] instead of Heath, it would be like going straight from the fridge into the freezer.” Anonymous shadow cabinet minister on Sir Keith Joseph’s leadership potential, c October 1974

“Some Chancellors are macro-economic. Other Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap. When he rose to speak yesterday we on this side were all amazed how one could possibly get to be Chancellor of the Exchequer and speak for his Government knowing so little about existing taxes and so little about the proposals which were coming before Parliament. If this Chancellor can be Chancellor, anyone in the House of Commons could be Chancellor.” Margaret Thatcher on Denis Healey, 22 January 1975

“Talking to Edward du Cann was rather like walking downstairs and somehow missing the last step. You were uninjured but remained disconcerted.” Alan Watkins, c 1975

“He’s passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever.” Michael Foot on David Steel, March 1979

“Anthony’s father was a mad baronet and his mother a very beautiful woman. That is what Anthony is, half a mad baronet himself and half a beautiful woman.” R.A. Butler on Anthony Eden, 1981

“Does the right hon. Lady understand—if she does not yet understand she soon will—that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt?” Enoch Powell on Margaret Thatcher before the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, 14 November 1985

“The trouble with Michael [Heseltine] is that he had to buy all his furniture.” Michael Jopling, June 1987

“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Lloyd Bentsen on Dan Quayle, 5 October 1988

“He did not have political principle… he had short-term opportunism allied with a capacity for self-delusion which made Walter Mitty appear unimaginative.” Denis Healey on Harold Wilson, October 1989

“Dan Quayle is all three! All three! Stupid, full of shit, and fucking nuts! And where did he get that wife of his? Have you taken a good look at that Marilyn Quayle? Where did he get her, at a Halloween party or something? She looks like Prince Charles, for Christ’s sake!” George Carlin, March 1990

“This fellow they’ve nominated claims he’s the new Thomas Jefferson. Well, let me tell you something. I knew Thomas Jefferson. He was a friend of mine. And governor, you’re no Thomas Jefferson.” Ronald Reagan on Bill Clinton, 17 August 1992

“A numbing fusillade of platitudes… his brain permanently on line to a fad lexicon…Mr Blair uses abstract nouns as a wine writer uses adjectives, filling space with a frothy concoction devoid of meaning.” Simon Jenkins on Tony Blair, 1997

“A fucking rapist, a war criminal, and a pathological liar.” Christopher Hitchens on Bill Clinton, 26 March 1999

“Tony Benn is described as a politician by those who have never met him.” Gerald Kaufman on Tony Benn, 25 October 2002

“Approached by someone like Michael Moore, a conservative would drop a quarter in Moore’s Starbucks cup and hurriedly walk away.” P.J. O’Rourke, July 2004

“He looks so much like what he is: a thug and a demagogue, the type of working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it who is too used to the expenses account, the cars and the hotels—all cigars and back-slapping. He is a very cheap character and a short-arse like a lot of them are, puffed up like a turkey. He has managed to fuse being a Baathist with being a Muslim sectarian and a carpet-bagger in the East End—as well as a front for a creepy sub-Leninist sect, the Socialist Workers’ Party. He’s got the venomous riff-raff at one end and your one-God fanatics on the other.” Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway, 19 May 2005

“The Prime Minister clings to data the way a drunkard clings to lampposts, not for illumination but to keep him standing up.” Romano Prodi on Silvio Berlusconi, April 2006

“If you gave [Rev Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.” Christopher Hitchens, May 2007

“I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to... the empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offences to morality and to truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend… people like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.” Christopher Hitchens on Rev Jerry Falwell, May 2007

“Rudy Giuliani—there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.” Joe Biden, October 2007

“She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.” P.J. O’Rourke endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, 7 May 2016

“The thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail.” David Cameron on Boris Johnson, October 2019

“Useless fuckpigs in charge.” Dominic Cummings on the Cabinet, August 2020

“He is going to be Heath with jokes added in, and Thatcher with consistency taken out, all rolled into a bundle of resentment, denial, attention-seeking and attempted vindication that will be a permanent nightmare for the new prime minister.” William Hague on Boris Johnson, 25 July 2022