Send the Lords to Buck House
Send the Lords to Buck House
Christopher HopeFri, July 10, 2026 at 6:00 PM UTC
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A palace fit for peers? - REUTERS
Ping! Tory senior treasurer Lord Leigh of Hurley texts in with a use for newly refurbished Buckingham Palace now the King and Queen do not want to live there. “We should consider relocating the House of Lords there,” he says, as a solution of how to “decant” peers from the Palace of Westminster so major refurbishment can start.
Lord Leigh makes a convincing case. Buckingham Palace “is close to Whitehall and Westminster with excellent security, office space and parking. It has to be better value to the taxpayer than paying rent somewhere. I suspect most peers’ only concern might be over the quality of the catering there. I am assured they need not worry. This proposal will take away most of the opposition to the decant idea and so save literally billions of pounds.”
Do you have any better ideas about what to do with Buckingham Palace?
Off with their hats
If Count Binface wins next month’s Clacton by-election he has a problem, the bin on his head. Conservative shadow Attorney General Lord Wolfson of Tredegar warned this week: “By convention MPs may not address the House wearing a hat: a constitutional crisis awaits.”
Is there a solution?
Unhappy meal
Former Tory leader William Hague was guest speaker at Edward Heath Day. Commemorations in Salisbury Cathedral were followed by tea and dinner in the garden of Heath’s former home Arundells to raise funds for the house on Thursday. He was asked which of our 58 prime ministers he would like to have dinner with and which he would not. Hague replied that he would have loved to dine with William Pitt the Younger – Hague is his biographer – and William Gladstone, before adding: “As for the prime minister I’d least like to dine with, well I have had dinner with them!” Who can he mean?
Holding out for a hero
The late Welsh rocker Bonnie Tyler, who spoke excitedly about her 2026 tour last November on GB News, once bumped into Radio 4 Brain of Britain quizmaster Russell Davies and Lucky Jim author Kingsley Amis in Swansea. “Kingsley Amis and I met her by chance in the Mumbles cafe-pub where, under her real name of Gaynor [Hopkins], she was evidently the life and soul. Certainly was that day,” says Davies. “Kingsley went almost unnoticed.”
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MPs caught soft-handed
MPs have been commenting on new Green MP Hannah Spencer’s rough hands since her by-election win in February. The former plumber, pictured, told last weekend’s Bradford Literature Festival: “They had been talking about me after they’d shaken my hand. My hands are very rough and they said, ‘We can really tell she’s done a manual job.’ It would appear they haven’t shaken the hands of many tradespeople.”
This explains a lot about what is wrong with the House of Commons.
Mackay’s tribute
Lord Mackay of Clashfern, the former Lord Chancellor who has died, paid tribute to the doorkeepers, attendants and restaurant staff when he retired from the Lords after four decades in 2022. He singled out “those ladies whose job it is to clean the huge number of books that are covering our corridors. I have spoken to them very often and it is wonderful to see how cheery they are”.
Michael Forsyth, now the Lord Speaker, framed the speech and gave a copy to the cleaners. “They were over the moon,” he tells me.
Love all, actually
Actor Jason Isaacs complains that his documentary-maker wife Emma Hewitt, pictured, doesn’t like tennis. “She’s no interest. Not only has she no interest in playing, no interest in watching, I brought her one year to the Royal Box and she took a book out and started to read,” he told the Wimbledon radio channel this week. “I said, ‘Darling we are on television.’ She said, ‘We are not.’ I said, ‘Not only are we but if you read your book we are definitely going to be on telly’.”
Was she at least be cheering for Arthur Fery?
Keeping cool
Thank you for your tips on keeping cool in the heatwave. Reader Howard Slater suggested buying “a well known brand of ‘pop-up tent’ and spend peaceful nights sleeping in it, in the cool of your rear garden”. I have been following the advice of Michael Cattell who said: “Fill hot water bottle with water, place in freezer, then use later for comfort in bed.” But I preferred Ramesh Nayak’s suggestion. “Freeze your socks before putting them on,” he told me. “Feet are good heat exchangers, cooling them can make the body feel more comfortable.” Don’t mix them up with the fish fingers.
Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope. You can reach him at peterborough@telegraph.co.uk
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
