Member

Yet, instead of taking advantage of this, we seem to be exiling them from the House. The egalitarianism that is a such a motivating part of the Government’s creed, for better or for worse, has surely reached its ludicrous stage when it forces the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain to queue up in the Pass Office to get a visitor’s lanyard for admittance to your Lordships’ House. Even the most egalitarian tricoteur on the Benches opposite must recognise that there is something wrong about us treating so ungratefully two noble men, whose sole crime is to have agreed to their sovereign’s request to serve their country in the way their ancestors have for generations. In this building, where every brick exudes history, are we really going to expel the holders of two of the great offices of state that derive from the 12th century?