Just two questions this week, neither as hard as last week’s question. 1. How many current members of the House of Lords have served as Secretary of State for Wales? Who are they? 2. I served as principal private secretary to Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson as Chancellors of the Exchequer. I have served as…
The death of Baroness Chapman has been announced. Though the House has a number of wheelchair-bound peers, she was the first person with a congenital disability to be appointed to the House. She was born with brittle bone disease and was no more than two feet or so in height. After studying maths and business…
Those with military experience will know that AWOL = absent without leave! I did have some leave but I can’t claim that I did my duty as well as some other Peers who blogged from holiday and home and certainly not as well as ace blogger Lord Norton – when does he sleep? Today I am…
The media have been reporting various entries sent in to the Times Higher Education’s “exam howlers” competition. According to one student, the UK has an electoral system known as “first parcel post”. I had a student on one occasion who wrote “the Prime Minister has the power of disillusion”. I had to point out that,…
I read another newspaper article yesterday that appeared to lack any grasp of parliamentary history. In the Evening Standard, the City Editor Chris Blackhurst wrote that he was not certain a Conservative Government would take decisive action, even with a large majority. He went on: “I’m beginning to think a hung Parliament might be the…
Having committed myself to episodic blogging throughout the recess, I thought I managed fairly well in Italy but was completely stymied in Canada where remoteness up in the northern lakes of Ontario prevented me accessing mobile phones and internet regularly. I am full of admiration for Lord Norton carrying the banner for us all and…
Just one question this week, principally because I think it is an extremely difficult one. However, on past performance I may well be proved wrong. The first two readers to get it correct will be prize winners. Peers variously list their recreations and many are the sort of thing you may expect – music, opera,…
I see that Daniel Hannan was invited to comment on my previous post and he wrote: “Lord Norton, who is a clever and learned man, knows very well that journalists don’t write their own headlines. And it’s not the period from 1945-1970 that I regard as the golden age of parliamentary supremacy, but the period…
This morning´s edition of The Daily Telegraph has an article by Daniel Hannan headed “Let´s return to the good old days when MPs didn´t always toe the party line”. The only problem with this is that there were no “good old days”. Far from MPs becoming more prone to toe the party line, the movement…
