Conventionally Speaking

The House of Lords has the opportunity to add to the Salisbury Conventions (there are in fact two, named after two different Salisburys) the Mandelson Convention: that it rejects any measure that the governing party had promised in its manifesto not to enact.

Billy Hayes is the sort of trade union leader who ends up in the House of Lords (or did in better days), and one rather hopes that he will. It really has come to something when a man who helped Peter Kilfoyle to defeat Militant in Liverpool Walton is now branded “Loony Left” or what have you for seeking to defend national sovereignty, rural communities and the monarchy’s direct link to every address in the land against someone who has never said that his own Communist past was wrong at the time.