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Speakership: House Committee Report

My Lords, I am one of those noble Lords who has supported the Motion. Anybody would think that the House Committee was staffed by Martians, who had absolutely no conception of what went on in this House. But they are representative of all of us and they have come up with this recommendation. From some of the comments that have been made, I sniff old battles being revisited. I really believe that. I am sorry if that is not true in the case of my noble friend Lord Barnett. That is technically not correct, but perhaps I may call him that as we have sat cheek-by-cheek, as it were, over the years. It is a job that we can create. We have heard that the officeholder will sit for three hours every day, but that is the least important part of the job. He or she will be representing us across the world and—I regard this as the most important part—will be going around the United Kingdom talking to people of every age and every class about what this place is, trying to repair some of the damage that the ignorance has caused over the years. When I worked in marketing about 150 years ago, we had the phrase, ““If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys””, but I am not even sure that we are going to get very many monkeys at the sort of figures being talked about today. If this matter goes to a Division, I shall certainly vote in favour of the Motion.