However, whether or not it is Labour’s Tony Banks in 1989, saying “he’s to the humanities what Vlad the Impaler was to origami”, or Labour’s Denis Healey describing being attacked by his reverse quantity Geoffrey Howe in 1978: “It is like being savaged by a lifeless sheep”, the one comforting fixed in British politics is that politicians have at all times been capable of finding methods of being impolite to one another – with or with out swearing.
