They sneered as if inspecting an orf sardine at the club
CALAMITY Hogg was to the fore on another day of selfdamage at the House of Lords. Debating the greatest public vote ever held in this country, their lordships sneered down their snouts like monocled Blimps inspecting an orf sardine at their London club tables. ‘This fish stinks, Willoughby. Take it away!’
Or as former Tory MP Douglas Hogg, whom we must now call Viscount Hailsham, wailed to peers: ‘I think Brexit is a national calamity!’ And that was why he was collaborating with Remainer-in-chief Dominic Grieve in opposition to the darned thing.
Hogg/Hailsham stood in the middle of the Tory benches, waving so many pieces of paper, he could have raided Horatio Nelson’s admiralty charts of the Bay of Biscay.
As he spoke he turned almost 360 degrees, looking this way and that, pushing forth his chin, nudging his glasses up his honk and spraying nearby lords and ladies with a light vapourisation of spittle – comparable to the ‘mist’ setting you can select on the more expensive type of garden hose. Good for the philadelphus.
His wife, who is also a peer, kerching, kerching, should send him outside at their Lincolnshire stately home (the one whose moat he mentioned in his expenses) and get him to practise his speeches in front of the hybrid tea roses. It would save their gardener an awful lot of watering.
Brexiteer Lord Robathan (Con) aked if Hailsham simply wished ‘at all costs, to destroy Brexit’.
A nearby peer, who I think was Remainer Lord Cormack, snapped: ‘You are an idiot!’ Tut tut. Lord Cormack always tells others of the importance of parliamentary manners. One Opposition peer flicked a V sign at Lord Robathan. Lord Moat deplored newspaper commentators who had given Mr Grieve a bit of what-for. Readers, I blushed.
In reply to Lord Robathan, he adopted a weird growl and said: ‘This is the High Court of Parliament and we are not party hacks.’ This from a loyal servant of John Major, who whipped the Commons remorselessly on the Maastricht Treaty.
THE only other thing to mention, amid all this grotty Upper House contempt for the EU referendum, was a speech from former Tory minister Lord (Michael) Spicer, visibly reduced by terrible illness. He explained that it would likely be his final speech in Parliament, for his disease was so bad.
And for his final contribution, which was made with evident difficulty, he told the House that the most important of all democratic entities was the nation state. Only the nation state could command loyalty from its citizens. The European Union was no such nation state and that was the problem.
In the Commons, MPs had two emergency discussions. The first was about the provision of cannabis oil as a treatment for children with life-threatening illnesses.
Home Office minister Nick Hurd explained that the Government was bound by rules which made this oil very hard to approve. It was all ‘very difficult’ but a committee would be established and they would do their best, etc.
Moments later there was a discussion about ‘upskirting’ (the practice of filming up a woman’s dress).
A justice minister, Lucy Frazer, said the Government was so cross about an alleged delay to anti-upskirting legislation that brand new legislation would be introduced before the week was out. See? They can do it when they so wish.
How MPs vied with each other for some of the saintly gravy surrounding this matter.
Speaker Bercow muscled into it, pointing out that a campaigner was in the gallery and how marvellous she was.
Ministers strained to look up at her and give heroic smiles.
Upskirting indeed sounds most odd. It was refreshing to hear MPs denounce its practitioners as ‘perverts’ (are we not normally meant to try to understand sexual deviants?)
But Labour’s Catherine West offered a moment of rather devastating scepticism. The police, she pointed out, currently solve just 5 per cent of burglaries. What chance will they ever have of nabbing nasty upskirters?