Sir Humphrey Appleby, GCB, KBE , MVO, MA (Oxon).
I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it.
I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it.
On capital punishment, I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolishionist.
I would’ve been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac.
But above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.
Source: Sir Humphrey Appleby; Yes, Minister – BBC TV, 1982
Words, By George! 