Some things have changed for the better

Whatever the faults of the present House of Lords, at least it no longer has an inbuilt Tory majority due to the hereditary system. I came across this great comment by Lord Tordoff, the Liberal Democrat whip in the 1990s about the easy job his Conservative opposite number in the Lords had: "Whenever I see the Duke of Atholl in the lobby, I know that he's got to the end of the alphabet again."