If you read Steps of the Throne here this week you will know that I had a Blue Peter moment. Cutting and pasting is such fun and much quicker than writing an original post. I’m itching to use my electronic scissors again.
When Francis and I met for lunch. a few days ago he, to be frank, didn’t believe that the children of peers aren’t allowed to prop up the bar of the House of Commons. So I trawled the internet and while I find nothing to support his assertion I did find something new and relevant to me (as an occasional taker of snuff), snip-snip.
Another curious survival of the eighteenth century is the provision of snuff, in recent years at public expense, for Members and Officers of the House, at the doorkeepers’ box at the entrance to the Chamber. Very few Members take snuff nowadays. Snuff, however, is the only form of tobacco to be tolerated in or around the Chamber: smoking has been banned there and in committees since 1693.
Curious that smoking should have been banned about 300 years before it was banned everywhere else. You are perhaps wondering if it’s permissable to have a nip of what the late Jeffrey Bernard called “electric soup”? Yes, but only in the Chamber if you are delivering a Budget speech. If I had that task I’d defer the drink until I’d got the speech out of the way.
However, there is no restriction on taking on board a few before entering the Chamber. You will recall that Alan Clark, the late politician, historian, diarist, skier, walker and adulterer, did just this before speaking in a debate and somehow got away with it. He was “on” at 10.00 pm and fitted in a wine tasting beforehand and he did it with style.
“We `tasted’ the first bottle of ’61 Palmer, then `for comparison’ a bottle of ’75 Palmer then, switching back to the ’61, a really delicious Pichon Longueville … By 9.40 I was muzzy.”
To raise the tone, there is a prayer used before the Sittings. I will give you a flavour.
May they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind….
As they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I wonder if they might not do better to recite General, Lord Astley’s prayer before the Battle of Edgehill?
O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not forget me.
Alan Clark. Or the Hon Alan Clark, son of the great Lord Clark; advanced to HM’s Most Honourable Privy Council, hence thereafter the Right Hon Alan Clark.
He was one of my favourite figures or characters in the Commons.
I have a number of his books, including Back Fire: A Passion For Motoring (great read, by the way).
My old school pal and toper, Dangerfield, has kept it on permanent loan, to my consternation (!).
The exceptionally early prohibition of smoking makes more sense when you consider the state of the House of Commons in the 17th and 18th centuries. The chamber was notoriously cramped and foul-smelling, the natural consequence of cramming five hundred men into a small, badly ventilated former chapel. Tobacco smoke was the last thing those people needed.
And things would only become worse: the Union with Scotland brought 45 new MPs to the House, and another 100 Irish MPs were added a century later. Ventilation experiments were undertaken (failures all), and plans were made from time to time for the relocation of the Commons to another chamber or the improvement of the existing one (which also never came to anything). The place remained unhealthy, and in important debates downright intolerable; for years Honourable Members were given little choice but to keep on griping about their increasingly decrepit chamber (part of an ageing and ramshackle building complex), leaving a pungent trail of indignation across the pages of Hansard. It took cleansing fire and technological progress to finally resolve the matter, though not immediately or without further bitter conflicts between politicians, architects and inventors.
A little reminder, perhaps, of how much we have come to depend on air conditioning, little though most of us think of it nowadays…
Basil, that explains a lot to me, thank you.
Christopher