Alice would have felt entirely at home if she had strayed into the Lords chamber on Tuesday afternoon, the first day back after the Summer Recess. Everything seemed the wrong way round or upside down. First, several Peers nearly strayed into the wrong seats, because – by mutual agreement between the party leaders – the…
There are some deeply worrying reports coming from the Palestine/Israel talks in the US. Simon Tisdall writing in the Guardian today (Tuesday 5th October) suggests the talks are likely to end in failure. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/04/israel-palestine-peace-collapse It is getting hard to see how we can maintain even a semblance of peace in the region especially as other…
I always think the start of the Party conference season is a bit like the 12th of August when the shooting season begins – or perhaps like the British Raj in India departing to Simla to avoid then summer heat! In any event it has become an established part of our political calendar and it…
I returned recently from a legal conference in S Africa about the Rule of Law, attended by equal numbers of British and S African lawyers and judges. The legal profession in S Africa is of the highest quality; even at the height of apartheid their judges bravely defended human rights (although not always). British law students…
For this week’s quiz, I thought I would again invite readers to identify peers who are pictured. However, this week there is a theme to the selection and it is, I think, much easier that last week’s. If you can identify one of the peers pictured, you can probably work out the theme and soon…
As Lord Soley mentions, William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister at the age of 24. He was elected as an MP at the age of 21 and became Chancellor of the Exchequer eighteen months later. He then twice refused the premiership before accepting it in December 1783. The Tory preponderance in the Lords that existed…
I was talking to an Ambassador at the Labour Party conference and he said he was saddened about the ever lower age of British political leaders. He said he had always associated Britain with wise statesmanship and that the younger age of Prime Ministers meant we were no longer getting this. There have been…
Yesterday an invitation arrived from Baroness Stern to the inaugural AGM of the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. Very timely. Teresa Lewis, a 41yr old woman with borderline subnormal level of intellectual development was the first woman to be executed by the State of Virginia for nearly a century. This…
This week’s quiz draws on photographs rather than descriptions of members of the House of Lords. Reproduced here are pictures of three relatively recent entrants to the House; one entered in 2007 and the others much more recently. Two of the three are professors. The first two readers to identify correctly all three peers will…
