Neil Kinnock was on vocal form at the launch of Peter Hain's new book Back to the Future of Socialism in the Commons on Monday night.
The former Labour leader told the assembled crowd that Mr Hain's book was refreshingly free of propaganda or polemic.
Not that there was anything inherently wrong with those, he suggested.
"Polemic has its place," he said.
"God knows, (if it didn't) I would have been out of a job."
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SNP deputy leader Stewart Hosie has come up with a neat euphemism for the precipitous fall in oil prices since last summer. He described the drop from $115 dollars per barrel to under $50 - a plunge which has raised fresh questions about the SNP's economic plans for independence - as "the softening in the oil price".
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New Lib Dem peer Baroness Pinnock, of Cleckheaton, went for praise mixed with humour in her first speech in the Lords.
She told fellow Lords her home town was a large rural areas best known as the setting for The Last of the Summer Wine.
She went on to describe the former BBC Sunday teatime favourite as: "A show about a group of elderly rabble rousers and a man called Clegg - something with which I'm sure many of these benches can empathise..."
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Are senior Tories starting to flag under the pressure of the general election campaign?
At a press conference in Westminster to launch a pamphlet, Tory chairman Grant Shapps accidentally claimed there were only "100 years to go until polling day..." The topic of the Tory document? "Labour chaos"
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IT was made clear by the SNP leadership long ago - the Braveheart rhetoric is off limits.
Words like 'Freedom' were banned in the referendum campaign, while more prudent Nats run a mile if they detect even a tiny whiff of anti-Englishness and the possibility of a flashbulb lurking. But backbench MSP Christine Grahame cunningly managed to sneak the most-forbidden of names into a Holyrood debate this week on Iraq, when she unearthed a historic quote from William Wallace - the retired United States Army General.
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