Political Parties and Elections Bill

I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, would regard it as a betrayal of a confidence if I said that he and I had a short conversation during the 10-minute interval while we were waiting in the queue to get some food. I complimented him on the fact that he was participating in this Committee and was here the whole time, and I thought that the Committee gained enormously from his doing so. He reminded me that he periodically moved amendments which, to borrow the language of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, I might find inconvenient. I said it was perfectly true that I had had quite a lot of those, not only in business such as this but also in business relating to the City of Westminster. I want to make two generic points about the opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. The first, I remark in passing, relates to parliamentary procedure. I totally understand the unhappiness about the inability of the Commons to debate and vote on the issue that we are discussing now. However, when I was a Whip in the Government between 1979 and 1983, on no less than three occasions we sat for between 100 and 135 hours and did not guillotine the Bill; in other words, we did what the House of Lords does—we looked at absolutely the whole Bill. I recognise that in the ensuing 20 years Governments have found that pattern of behaviour inconvenient, and of course the right to guillotine was always available to us, had we chosen to use it. However, it is slightly disingenuous of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, to complain about the outcome in the House of Commons when it is the Government that he supported in the House of Commons who introduced programming that I personally consider to be a flagrant interference with the right of the elected House. I think that the noble Lord wants to interrupt me.