> "A politician is a person who will lay down your life for his
> country."

Towards the end of his premiership, prime minister Harold Macmillan conducted a cabinet purge, known at the time as the Night of the Long Knives. According to the Beeb's retrospective article:

The then-rising political star of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, famously summed up the mood in Westminster when he said "greater love hath no man than this - that he lay down his friends for his life."