Quotes from Gavin Esler

Anyone who goes through divorce goes through a very hard time.

I spent the first three years of my life with my parents, grandmother and two aunties in a tiny council house in Glasgow.

As a journalist, I have spent years reporting on often difficult and depressing conflicts, on poverty, and the inhuman way we sometimes treat each other.

People in the U.S. who feel they need guns or enjoy gun sports of various types, are, in other words, decent, law-abiding, generally honest members of society. Their wish to have guns should be respected.

The U.S. has always been an indispensable ally.

Every year I go to Denver, usually between June and August. I hire a car and head up to the Rocky Mountain National Park, about a three-hour drive. It's my idea of heaven on earth and just talking about it puts me in a good mood.

Life is about relationships, not transactions.

I have my mother's nose and my father's bone structure, which I've passed on to my children. My eldest daughter and my mother, when she was young, could be sisters.

Rich, poor, white, people of colour, are all equally irreplaceable.

International politics attracts politicians who talk a good game, but whose achievements are often slender.

Compromise disappoints those who buy into the most ambitious and simplistic populist slogans.

A political and economic system that only works for a small group at the top is a system that needs to change.

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

I have a long connection with Kent and Canterbury and I hope to help other young men and women to achieve their ambitions through a wonderful university experience.

With Bill Clinton, his lawyers always wanted him to say nothing about the Lewinsky scandal. Defendant Clinton had the right to remain silent. But President Clinton had a completely different need - political survival. That meant, in the end, that he needed to trumpet his supposed innocence and talk publicly to the American people.

Nobody is infallible, but it is important to have trusted guides when it comes to information.

As journalists we are sceptical by nature, but there are some things you take on trust.

Maybe because I've worked in the BBC for so long I am completely allergic to meetings.

A Jethro Tull album was - along with Cream and Led Zeppelin - one of the first I ever bought.

Leaders of organisations, political parties and large businesses frequently fail to talk in a straight and entirely truthful fashion.

London thrives because it is one of the most open cities in the world, but Brexit is shutting the door on talented people coming to live and work here - the people we need when we get sick, the ones we see on the Tube, our friends and neighbours. Even worse, it has made London a less tolerant place.

Brexit is turning out to be a really really bad meal. We ordered steak and chips and we've now got some raw chicken that smells bad.

Donald Trump's tweets attract ridicule from some. But clearly they communicate effectively with his millions of supporters.

In the Stephen Sondheim song, when something bad happens in the circus, they send in the clowns. In America's political circus, they send in the lawyers.