Political Parties and Elections Bill

My noble friend is always helpful. It is 137 years. I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, but everything he has said this afternoon must take him to vote against the inclusion of the clause when we reach Report, otherwise there will be no debate in the other place. In my view, there must be such a debate. I also very much respect the point he makes about family. When I was first elected to the House of Commons in 1974, it was with a majority of nine. At three o’clock in the morning, just a few days afterwards, we were rung up by a pig farmer who said, "My family and I, we was the nine". Of course they were. Throughout the whole of that Parliament, my telephone number and home address were in the directory. We had people on the doorstep, but not usually at three o’clock in the morning, and not always pig farmers. Throughout the period when Iraq was a big issue—I voted against the invasion of Iraq, which was not popular at the time—my telephone number and address were in the book. I take very seriously the fact that we who enter public life take on that responsibility, that risk; in no way do I step back from that, and I think that my wife would take the same view. At the time when the pig farmer rang, my children were quite small—one child was on the way, if I remember rightly—but by the time Iraq came along, they were well and truly grown-up and had sensibly left the parental home, so there was not the same sort of risk. Do we honestly think that Saddam Hussein—I do not think that he was very efficient in these matters—would have gone around the electoral registration offices to look up the addresses given by parliamentary candidates at the previous election? Of course not. As several of my noble friends have said, there are much easier ways to obtain the private addresses of individuals. I come back to the point that that would be as true of a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly as someone who standing for the Westminster Parliament. It is a red herring, and the security issue is a non-starter. If it really is thought to be so important, why have we not had a brief from the security services, as my noble friend Lord Maclennan said? No one has provided any evidence that this is a necessary protection for parliamentary candidates. There are obviously much more important issues and much more important ways in which this can be obtained.