What was so amazing about the invasion of the Commons? Nothing.(Another Voice)

Publication: Spectator

Publication Date: 25-SEP-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)

What guff people do talk. To read the hysterical press which greeted last week's pitch-invasion in the Palace of Westminster you would have thought the unguarded nature of the Commons Chamber was news to anybody. You would have thought the pro-hunt protesters had found a loophole which nobody had thought of. You would have thought something had been learnt. What next? A bomb on the London Underground, followed by a scandalised Fleet Street wail that Tube bosses have been 'caught napping' in their failure to frisk and X-ray a million commuters and all our bags twice a day?

Intelligent lobby correspondents--mature men and women, journalists who have grown grey in the service of parliamentary reporting--penned breathless columns expressing their outrage at the supposedly astonishing scenes. Apparently we were all aghast. Yet any one of us could at any time in the last few decades have described in every detail the possibility which last week, year's later than I always expected, became a reality. For Pete's sake, traumatised editorialisers, have you never visited the Commons? Had you never noticed...

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