A peacock had taken over our garden at Stable House. Its heavy landings did the roof no good. It was grand to be back; but if I was to take part in the work of the Lords, we needed somewhere to live in London. Very foolishly I had sold our house in Denny Street before setting out for Bermuda, thinking that by the time I got home I would be well past working in the Lords. Now I was anxious to get back into the swim of things as soon as possible, and we bought a flat in Chester Way, a few yards from where we had been before, but nothing like as nice. Gilly disliked Chester Way. She wanted to garden in the country and soon got fed up at having to come up to London every now and then to, in her words, ‘muck me out’. So eventually we sold Chester Way and I moved into a club with many amusing companions like Bertie Denham* and Robin Ferrers**.

Meanwhile, back in Lancashire it never stopped raining. Walking in the fields round our house with mud up to the top of our gum boots was a boring experience, and eventually the weather defeated us. A tree trunk was washed down off Pendle and lodged itself in a culvert under the drive. The culvert tired of the insult and burst open, making the drive impassable.

We had been toying with the idea of moving south to warmer climes with better weather, and the flood made our minds up. But I am glad that before we moved I was President of the Royal Lancashire Show. It would have greatly pleased my father and grandfather.

New governments can usually endure a few calamities without their having much of an effect on their popularity. But it soon became clear after the election that sleaze was not just a Tory disease. Bernie Ecclestone gave £1 million to the Labour Party and then won for Formula One racing an exemption from the ban on tobacco advertising. The Welsh Secretary (Ron Davies) had a ‘moment of madness’ on Clapham Common, an explanation for his behaviour suggested to him by Alastair Campbell. Having trained for the job as a writer of pornography under the pen name Riviera Gigolo, Campbell was now press secretary at No. 10, and the following year he had to announce Peter Mandelson’s departure from the government after dealings about his mortgage had been leaked to the press.

In the Queen’s Speech we had also been promised a great programme of constitutional change, with referendums on devolution for Scotland and Wales and on a mayor for London; and the European Convention of Human Rights was to be incorporated into United Kingdom law. As to the last, I and only a few others spoke out about the dangerous territory into which we were moving. There was clearly the risk of clashes between Parliament and the judiciary, but few appreciated that the judges, who were going to have to interpret and then apply the very general words of the convention, might interpret them in the way most damaging for Britain and most likely, for instance, to undermine the country’s security and our immigration control. It is really quite extraordinary that in February 2012 the Court of Appeal, in setting aside a ruling by a judge that a man from Nepal should be allowed to remain in the United Kingdom, commented that it looked as if the judge had been on ‘a search for reasons for not deporting him.’

I raised in the Lords Basil’s treatment in quarantine kennels. We had been persuaded to send him back to England in January 1997 so when we had got home ourselves we would not have to wait too long before being able to collect him. We were recommended a place in Deal and every now and then we used to get cheerful messages from the establishment telling us how well Basil was doing. Eventually we went to collect him and to our surprise he was brought to us in the arms of a kennel maid. ‘You are not to worry,’ she said, ‘he has not had much room to move about and is a little stiff,’ but in the car as we drove north he was whimpering, and that night as he lay in the basket I had put by our bed he was very distressed and having difficulty in breathing. First thing in the morning we took him to the vet in Clitheroe who, in accusatorial tones asked me how long I had allowed my dog to be in such a terrible state. I told him that I had only just picked Basil up from quarantine kennels, and his only response was: ‘Oh my God!’

He said that he would have to carry out a thorough examination and it was agreed we would come back later in the day. When we returned to hear his verdict he said the dog was riddled with cancer and had to be put down. Back home I rang the kennels who protested that only a day or two before Basil had been seen by a vet who had declared him as fit as a fiddle. I made a formal complaint about the kennels, and I raised the matter in the Lords. And I like to think that the appalling way in which Basil had been treated did help Lady Fretwell’s successful campaign to get rid of quarantine for pets.

I went to a police dinner at which Richard Wilson, later to replace Robin Butler as Cabinet Secretary, recalled that when Tony Blair arrived at Downing Street and the staff were lined up to greet him one lady was weeping copiously: ‘Poor Mr Major, poor Mr Major,’ she wailed. The new Prime Minister, not knowing quite how to respond, said, ‘I am sorry.’ ‘No you are not,’ said the lady, ‘you meant it.’

As the weeks went by, William Hague, the new Leader of the Opposition, proved himself nimble on the floor of the Commons but after getting on a waterslide at Alton Towers wearing a silly cap he went downhill metaphorically as well as physically.

At the end of the year there was a splendid Privy Counsellors’ dinner in the Royal Gallery to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. We then set off for Australia and in the New Year flew to Tahiti and sailed up to the Marquesa Islands.

By now so-called friendly hours had been introduced in the Commons. They were no doubt friendly for families but they were really nice for the government, with the Opposition losing one of its only weapons – the power to harry the government late into the night and wear down its troops. Now the timetabling of Bills was to be routine, which resulted in them coming to the Lords with great chunks that had not been considered in the Commons. A system of deferred divisions was also introduced, allowing MPs to vote on a Wednesday on matters debated after 10 p.m. during the previous week when they might not have been in London, let alone the chamber. We were confident that when, sooner or later, Labour was booted out, these abominations would be consigned to the parliamentary dustbin, but I am ashamed to record that they have all been adopted by the coalition.

In the summer of 1998 I represented Parliament at the Tynwald Day ceremony in the Isle of Man. That year the event was attended by a representative from the Faroe Islands and at dinner one of my hosts asked me if I had ever been to the Faroe Islands. I said I had not. ‘Don’t go,’ came the reply. ‘It’s puffin for breakfast, puffin for dinner and puffin for tea.’

In the Queen’s Speech for the 1998–9 session it was announced that: ‘A Bill will be introduced to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. It will be the first stage in a process of reform to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative.’ When the Bill arrived on the scene there were some acrimonious debates and veiled threats that if the government pressed ahead without revealing its plans for a more democratic house its whole legislative programme might be at risk. At this stage I received a mysterious invitation to dine with Robert Cranborne*, then Leader of the Opposition in the Lords. At his London house I found myself with Janet Young**, Bertie Denham and one or two others who had been involved at some time or other in the business management of the House; and Robert proceeded to tell us what he had been up to. He had had meetings with the Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine***, and had reached agreement that a number of hereditary peers should remain in the House pending long-term reform and as a guarantee that such reform would take place. Jack Weatherill, the former Speaker of the Commons, had been persuaded to introduce the necessary amendments to give them cross-bench respectability. When it came to the question of the shadow Cabinet’s attitude towards all this, Robert was noticeably reticent: but under the impression that there would be little trouble, if not great enthusiasm, at the other end, we all said we would go along with what was proposed. What we certainly did not know was that when Robert had put his plan to the shadow Cabinet William Hague had given it an unequivocal thumbs-down.

The next day there was a meeting of the Association of Conservative Peers in the Moses Room and Robert told colleagues of the agreement he had reached with the government. He had asked me to get to my feet after he had spoken to express my support, and up I duly got. But I had hardly got into my stride when William Hague and a clutch of minions burst into the room. There was an awful pause after I had finished my remarks and then William set about me, because I was in the firing line, and then Robert. I cannot remember what he said but it was not complimentary, and outside the Moses Room there was an exchange between him and Robert which finished with Robert being sacked. The deal, however, had been done; the Weatherill amendment was carried, and in 2011 there were still ninety-two hereditary peers in the House. There have been a few deaths among the original ninety-two, but Derry, no doubt imagining that the promised changes to make the House ‘more democratic and representative’ would not be long delayed, had also agreed that there would be by-elections to provide replacements when deaths occurred.

In the 1999–2000 session the government introduced a Bill to lower the age for consent to buggery and homosexual acts from eighteen to sixteen. I found very offensive the suggestion that the Bill was extending the rights of 16–18-year-old boys. That, I pointed out, was rather like saying that a railway company bestows rights on its passengers when it leaves the train doors unlocked. The Bill was about removing from young people aged between sixteen and eighteen the protection they then had had against older people minded to prey on them.

The session also saw the scrapping of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986 which prevented a local authority from intentionally promoting homosexuality and from promoting the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. At that very moment the Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham Health Authority was funding a guide to the etiquette of ‘cruising and cottaging’ so it did not seem that after the introduction of Section 28, those minded to advertise and applaud promiscuous gay sex had learned the error of their ways. The North Bristol National Health Service Trust had certainly not, for it had just funded a so-called educational pack which encouraged children as young as fourteen to act out homosexual scenes, including pretending to be a married man addicted to having sex with other men in secret. ‘Allowing councils to promote homosexuality,’ said the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, ‘would run counter to a moral code shared by all the world’s great religions. There is a great danger that lifting the existing ban could lead to the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle as morally equivalent to marriage.’ And he has, we now know, been proved right.

The scrapping of the section proved to be the first of a whole raft of measures presenting a gay lifestyle as valid as any other and devaluing the institution of marriage. No sooner was the ink dry on the legislation licensing civil partnerships than people were demanding that civil partnership ceremonies should be allowed in churches, and soon after that there were even demands that gay marriage be legalised. Legislation was then introduced to ban the mere criticism of homosexual acts and preachers were being arrested, tried and convicted of offences under the Public Order Act after being assaulted by hooligans pretending to be offended by the preachers’ biblical quotations. But it did not even stop there. Soon there was legislation ostensibly to stop discrimination against persons in the provision of public services, but used instead to drive out of business Catholic adoption agencies, to ban employees from wearing crucifixes, to deny a registrar the right not to have to conduct a gay civil partnership ceremony and to punish a couple running a B&B for turning down a gay couple. In short, in this brave new world people were being persecuted for sticking to their Christian beliefs and acting according to a moral code which only a few years before had been accepted as the proper guide to behaviour by the vast majority of people. I spoke out against the government’s proposals on all these matters, with some others of a like frame of mind, and some good came to me from it.

First of all I got involved with the Christian Institute which was deeply concerned at what was going on, and I began to work with Baroness (Detta) O’Cathain when issues were raised which touched on the right of Christians to follow their beliefs. Detta’s Christian belief was rock-firm, and she was also firm in muscle. My legs were in a poor state and there came a day when they gave out on me. Lord (Ian) McColl was in the House and fearing something might be seriously amiss rang for an ambulance to take me to St Thomas’s. After a while a flustered ambulance driver appeared at the peers’ entrance and explained that everyone in London seemed to think they had got Asian flu and there was not an ambulance to be had, but he would wheel me to St Thomas’s. That he duly did, but by the time I had been checked over and deemed fit to return to Parliament, although still unable to walk, he had gone off duty and very sportingly Detta wheeled me all the way back to the House.

Few MPs and peers fail to find themselves involved in voluntary work of one sort or another. When I was MP for Ribble Valley I used to be asked by the then president of the East Lancashire Scouts to take the salute at the parade and march-past of the Scouts on St George’s Day. He then died and, not only did he in his will leave all his property to the Scouts, he included in the will a request that I should succeed him as President. It was a cunning move and when a delegation turned up at Stable House to seek my acceptance of the honour I could think of no reason to refuse. In fact, it proved a very worthwhile experience and I treasure the silver acorn I was awarded for my endeavours. I had to resign when we moved south but used all my powers of persuasion to get Lord Patel of Blackburn to take over from me in the hope that that might encourage more Asian boys to join the movement.

I was then also President of the Hertford Society which promotes the interests of Hertford College, Oxford. Many years earlier the college had refused my son James a place, but eventually I forgave them and was mollified when I was made an honorary fellow.

I was for a number of years a trustee of Natural Justice, a charity concerned, among other things, with the effect of diet on criminal behaviour, but eventually gave up when my ears packed up and I could not hear what was going on at meetings.

As to the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association (OSPA), of which I have for many years been President, it has among its members many former servants of the Crown who had worked in Southern Rhodesia and stayed on when it became Zimbabwe. It was a very serious matter for them when, first, run-away inflation reduced the value of Zimbabwean pensions to a pittance and, then, Mugabe and his government ceased making any pension payments at all in contravention of the terms of the independence constitution agreed at Lancaster House. At that juncture, the British government should have stepped in and assumed responsibility for payment of the pensions in the same way that they had done when the governments of other former colonies had defaulted. But, to its shame, the British government said it was under no obligation to help because Southern Rhodesia had been ‘an internally self-governing colony with its civil servants recruited by Rhodesia House in London rather than by the Colonial Office’. Those Crown servants were to be abandoned even though Rhodesia had been thought so much a British responsibility that Mr Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence had been resisted in every possible way. It seemed pretty daft and downright immoral to me, but I have got nowhere when I have raised the matter. That is not quite right. I did get somewhere with Lord Malloch-Brown who, having heard my pleas, seemed entirely persuaded and went away to tell the Foreign Office so. But after a month or two he came back and said most apologetically that he had failed to persuade his superiors.

I have been President of OSPA for far too long, and have asked them to look for someone to take on the Presidency – a step I was reluctant to take because, with the days of Empire fading into history and the last of its servants trooping to the grave, the winding up of the organisation might not long be delayed. There is, however, still important work to be done by the organisation. It is surely our duty to see that the good name of the Service is not sullied and that the public understands that those who went out to the colonies were motivated by a sense of public service and were there to help prepare the people for independence, not (as left-wing propagandists pretend) to bully the people and profit at their expense.

A few years ago there was a service in Westminster Abbey attended by the Queen to celebrate the work done by the Colonial Service over the years, and I asked Richard Luce to give the address. I remember the Queen listening with rapt attention as he described how, as a young district officer in Kenya, he dispensed justice under a tree; and I like to think that when a short time later he was appointed Lord Chamberlain I might have had a small hand in it. OSPA is very lucky to have Lord Luce at hand, always prepared to take a keen interest in its affairs.

Lastly, I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time supporting the National Council of Resistance of Iran which works tirelessly to hasten the day when Iran will be rid of the present tyrannical regime. Numerous articles under my name have appeared in American and other newspapers, and I was one of those who brought proceedings to have the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) removed from the list of organisations proscribed under powers in the Anti-Terrorism Act 2001. When Gilly and I went to Paris to meet Mrs Rajavi, the President of the NCRI, and attend a rally I found myself addressing 70,000 people in a gigantic hangar-like building somewhere in the northern suburbs. For me that was a record.

So I find it quite difficult to be bored and rarely succeed.

In the general election of 2001 William Hague led the Conservative Party to defeat after a lacklustre campaign in which he said that there were only a few days left to save the pound. The claim was not convincing, the government having promised a referendum if they concluded that the time was ripe to join the euro. When the votes had been counted William resigned and the Party had to set about electing a new leader. The obvious candidate was the one with vast experience of government, Kenneth Clarke, but I could not support him because of his pig-headed refusal to compromise in the slightest over Europe. Various people begged him to say that he would not force-feed the Party with his views and would listen to the opinions of others, but he went down to defeat having steadfastly declined to say anything of the sort. So Iain Duncan Smith won, but there were soon doubts as to whether he was up to the job.

John Prescott was now busy cooking up plans for elected regional assemblies. In the debate on the Queen’s Speech I expressed surprise at the extraordinary interest being taken in these developments by the bishops. ‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘unbeknown to me the synod has just slipped through an addendum to the creed: “I believe in the Balkanisation of England, another layer or two of local government, a multiplication of councillors and a Europe of the regions”.’ The Bishop of Bristol talked about bringing decision-making closer to the people, but that was not for one moment what the government’s plans meant. As I pointed out in the debate on the address, the plan was for powers devolved from Whitehall to go to regional bodies, not to existing local authorities which really were close to the people. Happily, the bishops did not get their wishes.

There could be no better reminder of our Christian heritage which some are trying to airbrush out of our island story than the fact that we have an established Church of which the Queen is Supreme Governor, with bishops of the Church sitting in Parliament. I do, however, confess that the bishops do sometimes try my patience – as I no doubt try theirs. They are very quick to talk of things like regional government where they have no special expertise, but in recent years they have been remarkably reluctant to speak out on matters of faith. It is ridiculous that it should have been for me, Detta and a few others like Rodney Elton* to defend the right of people to live by their Christian beliefs and practise their faith in the face of the rising tide of atheism, while the Bishops’ Bench has for most of the time stayed silent. The bishops, with one or two honourable exceptions, seemed to have become quite reconciled to ‘equal rights’ prevailing over the rights of people to practise their faith even when the result has been, as it was in the case of the Catholic adoption societies, reducing the chance of young children finding a good home and loving parents. Perhaps now after the spirited defence of the Church by the excellent Lord Carey and the intervention of the Queen, some of these bishops and other churchmen will at last wake up to the great danger the Church is now facing as a result of their not having faced up to the threat from secularism and atheism long ago.

In the early summer of 2003 when the government, grappling with the grizzly consequences of the invasion of Iraq, might have been thought to have something better to do, Blair decided to embark at home on a blatant and preposterous piece of constitutional vandalism. On 12 June 2003, there was an announcement on television that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished and the Earl of Onslow interrupted a debate in the House of Lords to say that it was an outrage that this should have been decided without debate. Lord Cope of Berkeley, the Opposition Chief Whip, intervened to say that one of the things the government was doing was taking away from the Lords the services of the Lord Chancellor as their presiding officer, which led Lord Williams of Mostyn, Leader of the House, to rise and refer to what appeared to be a press release entitled ‘Reform of the Speakership of the Lords’ which talked, he said, of a new Speaker for the Lords being in place after the recess. Lord Onslow’s motion that the House adjourn was lost, but the cat was out of the bag.

Although the office of Lord Chancellor was older even than Parliament, Tony Blair had decided to abolish it and create instead a Ministry for Constitutional Affairs – and to do so without consulting Parliament or even the Queen. The Prime Minister seems to have thought that all that was involved was a change in the machinery of government and he had to be told that there were about 5,000 references to the Lord Chancellor in primary and secondary legislation and there would have to be a huge ‘transfer of functions order’ to allow others to exercise functions then exercised by the Lord Chancellor. Furthermore, those of his functions which were judicial could not be transferred to any old Secretary of State, but would have to go to a ‘residual’ Lord Chancellor until legislation was passed creating a new head of the judiciary. At the eleventh hour Lord Irvine had put forward a compromise plan under which he would stay in office until these necessary changes had been made, but this idea was not acceptable to the Prime Minister and Irvine’s services had been dispensed with. A more pliable Lord Falconer of Thoroton had then agreed to serve as Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and was apparently under the impression that, there being no longer a Lord Chancellor, someone else would be found to sit on the woolsack when the House of Lords met in the morning. He was in for a rude awakening.

The Opposition Chief Whip let it be known that the Lords’ Standing Orders required the Lord Chancellor to be present and made it plain that there would be a most almighty row if he was not there. ‘But,’ said Falconer’s private office, ‘he has not got the uniform.’ ‘He had better find one,’ said Cope: and he did. Furthermore, he found himself compelled to continue to sit on the woolsack for many, many months while legislation creating a Ministry of Justice and a Supreme Court ground its way through Parliament.

Altogether it was a shocking tale of constitutional meddling and the arrogance of power. It also cost the public a mint of money: the Lords had now to elect a Speaker to replace the Lord Chancellor, and the new Supreme Court had to be found a lavish building in which to perform functions, which up to the time of Blair’s brainstorm the Law Lords had had no difficulty in carrying out in a modest room on the committee corridor in the Palace of Westminster.

Meanwhile, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was presiding over a commission charged with drafting a constitution for the European Union and the excellent Gisela Stewart, Labour MP for Edgbaston and a member of the commission, was being told by the great man that she had better shape up and agree with what he proposed or she would not get an equestrian statue of herself in her village square. Eventually the constitution was published and was found to contain 67,000 words with another 60,000 words in the appendices. Critics were not slow to point out that the Lord’s Prayer contains sixty-six words, the Gettysburg address 179 and the Ten Commandments 179. I spoke out against this piece of constitutional vandalism.

In November 2003, the government reclassified cannabis as a Class ‘C’ drug. I spoke against the order making the change and pointed out that downgrading cannabis and the decision to let off offenders with a caution sent out entirely the wrong signal to young people and made things almost impossible for parents. ‘Not only,’ I said, ‘does smoking cannabis all too often lead to the use of heroin and crack cocaine, traded by the very same dealers from whom the cannabis is obtained, it is a very dangerous drug itself. It is a mind-bending substance.’ And I then went on to quote what Professor John Henry, a toxicologist, had said at The Royal Society of Medicine conference in London: ‘Regular cannabis smokers develop mental illness. There is a four-fold increase in schizophrenia and a four-fold increase in major depression.’

I felt I had to explain why I felt so strongly about the matter, my son Matthew having had to leave Cambridge because of mental illness brought on by cannabis use. ‘I have to tell Your Lordships,’ I said, ‘that I know personally only too well that cannabis does ruin peoples’ lives. It has come close to ruining the life of someone very close to me who has suffered from schizophrenia as a result of cannabis use. That is the diagnosis so don’t tell me that cannabis is pretty harmless.’ The government got its order but in 2008 realised how foolish it had been and restored the original classification.

The beginning of 2004 saw the publication of the Report of the Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly. We on the Opposition benches in the Lords had prepared ourselves well before is publication. Clearly there was no way in which Alastair Campbell was going to wriggle out of this one, no chance of Geoff Hoon and officials in his Department having been able to persuade Lord Hutton that they had treated Dr Kelly properly, and Tony Blair was clearly in for a roasting for having remained silent when papers reported that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be used against us at forty-five minutes’ notice. Obviously it was going to be difficult for Michael Howard, Leader of the Opposition, who was not to see the report until the morning of the day on which it was to be presented to Parliament, but as it was so obvious that the government had misbehaved he would have in his head already the arguments to be used in the House. When, however, Michael read the report he must have been absolutely astonished, and a weaker man might have had all the stuffing knocked out of him. For the report was a complete whitewash.

A few days later there was a debate in the Lords. It was opened by Lord Falconer, still Lord Chancellor, and I followed. The report’s conclusion was that there was nothing wrong in the way Dr Kelly was revealed as the source for what Andrew Gilligan said on the Today programme. But that seemed quite bizarre. I reminded the House of what was said in Alastair Campbell’s diary: ‘GH (Geoff Hoon) and I agreed it would f*** Gilligan if that was the source – the biggest thing needed was the source out – spent much of the weekend talking to TB and GH re the source.’ Campbell had, in fact, said at the inquiry that in government circles it was recognised that it would indeed assist them to get Kelly’s name out in the open. ‘How on earth, in the face of all that,’ I said, ‘can one take seriously Mr Hoon’s statement that he made great efforts to ensure Dr Kelly’s anonymity? Far from doing anything of the sort, he agreed to the issue of a press statement and a course of action which he knew would lead to the naming of Dr Kelly. He did not even tell Dr Kelly what he was going to do.’

I continued:

Finally I reminded the House that the Prime Minister himself signed the foreword to the dossier which contained the words ‘His (Saddam’s) military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within forty-five minutes of an order to use them.’ The Prime Minister knew perfectly well, from the intelligence reports, that this did not mean that Saddam had long-range weapons at his disposal; but when newspapers took those words of his to mean that there was a threat to Britain from long-range weapons – when there was a headline in The Sun reading: ‘45 MINUTES TO DOOM’ and the Evening Standard wrote ‘45 MINUTES TO ATTACK’ alongside a photograph of a London street – Tony Blair did absolutely nothing to correct the false impression he had given.

There must have been thousands of people wanting to say what they thought about the government, Alastair Campbell, poor Dr Kelly and the Hutton Report. I could say what I thought and realised as never before how lucky I was to be a member of the Lords and able to debate great issues.

I was off work for quite a long time having a new knee; and on my return introduced a debate on immigration and asylum. I pointed out that by the latter part of the 1980s, with firm and fair immigration control established, immigration policy had ceased to be a very contentious matter, but Labour had allowed what was to all intents and purposes a free-for-all – with work permits handed out in ever increasing numbers. And with most immigrants going to the same parts of the country, an intolerable strain was being put on public services. Sham marriages, bogus students and fraudulent visa applications had made matters worse. Total net immigration to the UK, which in 1997 was 46,000, had over the previous five years averaged 157,000 a year. And it was estimated that over five million of the six million increase in population expected in the next thirty years would be due to new immigrants and their offspring. That was enough to populate six cities the size of Birmingham.

It does not seem that on this occasion my oratory was very persuasive, for in the years that followed things got even worse. When Brown got into office he proudly talked of his determination to cover great tracts of the country with concrete to house the growing population. Some were brave enough to point out that if we could limit immigration so that there were no more people entering the country than leaving, there would be no need for any of this massive housing development; but they, of course, were branded racists.

In the 2005 general election Michael Howard fought valiantly. The Tories won a number of seats but Blair was still left with a thumping majority. In the summer of that year my great friend Mark Carlisle died. For a long time he had suffered from ill-health but he never lost his zest for life. He was the most gregarious of men and my only complaint is that he liked drinking standing up. Because of the difference in height this used to give me a stiff neck. I felt it a great honour to be invited to give the address at his memorial service in St Margaret’s.

I will spare the reader an account of all I was up to in the next year or two but one matter is worth mentioning. A Bill to give effect to an agreement on European finance does not usually hit the headlines but in January 2008 I had the chance to put on record one of the most extraordinary betrayals of our country’s interests. The rebate on the UK’s contribution to the EU, hard-won by Margaret Thatcher, was protected by our veto and could not be taken from us without our consent, but Tony Blair surrendered a part of it for precisely nothing. It all started honourably enough with Blair championing the expansion of the EU into eastern Europe; and he seems to have convinced himself that the French would be prepared to agree to reform of the farm budget to pay for expansion if Britain sacrificed at least part of the rebate. That was inherently unlikely, Blair himself in 2002 having signed up to a CAP settlement to last through to 2013, but when the French gave the inevitable ‘non’, there was not the slightest need for the Prime Minister to do what he did which was, with great alacrity, to abandon his call for a budget freeze, abandon his call for a fundamental reform of Europe’s finances and hand over part of our rebate on a plate. What he ought to have done was take the rebate off the table, pack his bags and return home. The tale told of course was that all this was necessary to secure enlargement and we could not ‘will’ enlargement without being prepared to pay for it, but that is simply not what happened. When enlargement was already a done deal Blair had told the Commons: ‘the UK rebate will remain and we will not negotiate it away.’ That was the promise; and the promise was broken. We had by then got used to surrenders and with each one came the same lame excuse: ‘We had to surrender; failure to do so would have precipitated a crisis and, even worse, shown our lack of commitment to the EU.’ We can only hope that a new government has really learned a few lessons from Blair’s deceit over Lisbon and from this particularly dismal story about EU finance.

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which arrived in the Lords in January 2008 contained a clause which made it an offence to incite hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation. It seemed clear to many of us that if there was to be this new offence, it was important that it did not damage free speech; and in due course I moved an amendment to ensure that the police did not construe criticism as threats or confuse strong criticism of a person’s conduct with incitement to hatred. There was, I said, nothing in recent history to show that the police were good at distinguishing between legitimate comment and language calculated or intended to stir up hatred. I cited the case of the Bishop of Chester who was the subject of investigation by the Cheshire Police after he had made some comments about research showing that some homosexuals could be reoriented to heterosexuality. I also cited the case of the Fleetwood couple interrogated by the police after doing no more than complaining about their council’s gay rights policy and the case of Lynette Burrows who was questioned after saying on the radio that homosexual men might not be the right people to bring up children.

The amendment was reached very late in the day but we won by eighty-one to fifty-seven. The decision was reversed in the Commons but when the matter came back to the Lords we won by 174 to 164 and the government did not make another attempt to reverse the decision.

One might have expected that to be the end of the story but, to my astonishment, into the next session’s Coroners and Justice Bill the government slipped a clause repealing the free speech provision. Lord Bach, in moving the second reading of the Bill, sought to justify the government’s strange behaviour, suggesting that in allowing the free speech safeguard to reach the statute book in the previous session the government had made clear its intention to return to the issue when circumstances allowed. In fact the government had not said anything of the sort and had merely intimated that if Parliament at any time wanted to return to the issue it would be able to do so.

In July 2009, my motion that the clause repealing the free speech safeguard should not remain part of the Bill was carried by a majority of fifty-three, but the decision was reversed by the Commons, and did not come back to us until 11 November. Lord Bach argued that we should not take our disagreement with the Commons any further and should bow to the will of the elected House, but rather overdid it when he referred to the ‘clear and unambiguous view of the Commons’. That gave me the opportunity to point out that not a single Labour member supported the government’s case, except of course the minister speaking from the front bench.

We won the division by a majority of forty-four, but then had an anxious night and an early start in the morning preparing ourselves against the possibility of the decision being reversed in the Commons and our having to debate the matter yet again. But when the Commons met, a government motion that the House should not insist on its disagreement with the Lords was agreed without debate. Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Conservative) did, however, rise and say:

Not surprisingly the Deputy Speaker said it was no point of order and that was that.

After we had successfully amended the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill in April 2008 I had been astonished to receive a telephone call from one of our shadow ministers in the Commons saying that they were not going to support our amendment, but were going to put down their own amendment in lieu – the terms of which, I then discovered, would completely undermine the case I had been deploying. It was only after furious protests from Detta and myself and threats to resign the whip that these shadow ministers were eventually prevailed upon to change their minds. I thought it monstrous that they should think for one moment that it was right not to support colleagues in the Lords who had inflicted a very significant and wounding defeat on the government. But what I suppose was even more monstrous was that people who considered themselves Tories should not think it important to protect free speech and guard against people being prosecuted as a result of the authorities assuming that any criticism of sexual behavior must be motivated by hatred.

It was a notable victory achieved because of the marvellous support I received from the Christian Institute and Simon Calvert, in particular, and the heroic help I had from Detta O’Cathain.

* The Lord Denham, formerly government Chief Whip in the Lords.

** The Earl Ferrers, formerly Minister of State, Home Office.

* The Rt Hon. Viscount Cranborne, now the Marquess of Salisbury.

** The Baroness Young, formerly Leader of the Lords.

*** The Lord Irvine of Lairg.

* The Lord Elton, for many years a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government.