I think that is the nearest thing to a compliment I have ever received from my hon. Friend, and it is probably the nearest I am ever going to get, so I shall celebrate it quietly. I do not accept the second part of his argument—the first part I have already dealt with. He asserts that, in the absence of a separation of powers, which, as I have said, I would actually prefer to see, the danger from the numbers of MPs on the payroll, or the crypto-payroll of the Opposition, is that nobody is really holding anybody to account. Actually, the dynamic of this House of Commons—one can see it sitting here or standing here right now—is a dynamic of dialectic. The principal form of the holding to account
of the Government of the day resides on the Opposition Front Bench, not, I regret to say this, with my Back-Bench colleagues, among whom I now number myself. It is the quality of the Front-Bench arguments from the Opposition that principally challenges the Government of the day. This House is designed to reflect that, and that is the reason we do not sit in a circle, but opposite one another. That is behind the whole structure of debate in this House. Indeed, the timetable of this House is organised on that principle. If my hon. Friend’s charmingly nostalgic, although never-existing picture of a House of Commons that was holding Governments to account from the Back Benches were accurate, we would not recently have introduced a bit of Backbench Business; we would have substituted Opposition days, of which there are many, with Back-Bench days.