Member

I want to lay to rest one final idea—I have said it so many times in the past; it is trouble when you start getting bored of your own speeches: that there was some wondrous, unprecedented, novel occurrence at the time of the 1999 Bill when honourable people got together and gave an undertaking, and that dishonourable people such as me are not prepared to live by it 25 years later. That idea omits the central fact of that agreement: that it was made under duress. I am happy to say that it was an agreement that Viscount Cranborne made and that he has said since—I do not carry his sayings around with me, but, my word, they ring in my ears—that he “threatened” the Government