In preparation for a speech about the Victorian author Anthony Trollope I have been searching high and low, through every source I can think of (books, articles and the internet) for a quotation. Asked how he liked to relax, Harold Macmillan is reputed to have replied to the effect that “I take a good Trollope…
There is a big difference between the way the business is planned in the Commons and in the Lords. I used to be a minor channel (a drain rather than a canal, perhaps) when I was Chief Whip and then Shadow Leader of the Commons for the Liberal Democrats. There, so long as the Government…
I am beginning to worry that I’ve gone native. After three and a half years in the Lords, I am tempted to be even more pompous and semantic than I was before. Yesterday evening’s debates on the Marine and Coastal Access Bill took a curious turn when I asked the Minister leading to explain a…
This is the snow scene that greeted me and my camera last week. It has come to symbolise for me the state of many minds in Westminster. This week I asked the Government what they were going to do about reform of the Lords, since their White Paper was published some seven months ago. In…
My American friends and relations always express amazement at our British obsession with the weather … until, that is, they experience its vagaries. In so many parts of the US, and indeed in so many other continents, the pattern is both predictable and slow to change. Not so here. However, we do seem especially prone…
