The President of the Family Division of the High Court (ie the top family judge in England & Wales) is retiring in 3 days’ time and his successor has not been announced. Another judicial vacancy, in the Supreme Court, has just been filled this week after a search process lasting over four months. Why is…
For this week’s quiz, I thought I would follow the format of last week’s. It does not require an exhaustive knowledge of peers and may draw on observation. As usual, the first two readers to supply correct answers will be the winners. 1. The space behind the Clerks’ chairs is used for peers who are…
Baroness Park of Monmouth died on Wednesday evening. She was 88. As various obituaries have recorded, she spent her career in MI6. She concluded her career there as Controller, Western Hemisphere. The Times referred to her as ‘one of MI6’s most treasured intelligence officers whose secret career spanned Russia, Africa, Vietnam and Mongolia.’ Her looks belied…
There were over forty speakers in yesterday’s Second Reading debate on the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. The various delays to the Bill – introduced a year after the Joint Committee on the Bill had reported and taking seven months before being brought from the Commons – was roundly criticised from all parts of the…
I have rarely heard such a disgruntled debate as last night on the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. Lord Norton has already given the background in his blog of 22 March and was on fine form in the chamber. Lady Boothroyd, the former Speaker of the Commons, not normally given to hyperbole except in her…
The issues of settlements or colonies in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem is a crucial one. Of equal importance are East Jerusalem as a capital for Palestine, together with access for all who wish to visit Al Aqsa/The Temple Mount, in a peaceful way. The people of Israel will very soon have to…
I suspect that if you used the phrase ‘Westminster Village’ five years ago or more it would have neither sounded as familiar nor as pejorative as it seems now. But the longer I have been a citizen of this exclusive yet ‘all-inclusive’ village – for not far off four years – the more apt the…
Here is a parliamentary answer which almost left the questioner (Baroness Trumpington) speechless – with pleasure! http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200910/ldhansrd/text/100322-0001.htm#1003222000328 A new horse race announced for the Queens jubilee in 2012 with the Minister, Peter Mandelson, offering to march arm in arm with Baroness Trumpington campaigning for a trophy for the new race!
Notices of meetings of All Party Parliamentary Groups drop into our letter boxes every day but few are as compelling as the notice for the APPG which arrived yesterday on ‘Underground Spaces’. I confess that I assumed at first they were about underground art or some other esoteric matter such as underground economies. But no,…
