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Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

The hon. Gentleman was not here at the time, but I sometimes made life a bit miserable for some Ministers in a Conservative Government, and I made no apology for that, any more than my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) did, and he was very good at that. However, the fact is that we were acting as we saw it—perhaps we were wrong sometimes, nobody is perfect or infallible—and we were doing what we conceived to be our parliamentary duty. That duty has been taken away from us by the move to automatic timetabling, and particularly by the motion before us tonight.