The Cornerstone Group

Today I attend the memorial service for a former ministerial colleague from the days of Margaret Thatcher. John Biffen, who fell out with the Iron Lady in the end, was described by Brian Walden as ‘the most honest politician’ he had ever interviewed.

Not a bad epitaph from the usually hostile press!

I remember John Biffen personally with great affection. He was my father’s last ministerial boss when he was Leader of the House and my father was Clerk of the Privy Council.

This evening I attend a meeting of the Parliamentary and Public Affairs Committee of the Catholic Union, which will have much to discuss - not least regarding the HFE Bill I referred to above. The Catholic Union is a lay-run body that exists to lobby parliament on issues that concern Catholics.

Then there is an evidence session of the Liaison Committee. This is the body in which all the chairmen of the Select Committees have a regular meeting, outside the Commons chamber, with the Prime Minister.

It was introduced under Tony Blair: one of his many slights to the House, this time dressed up as enhanced access to the PM.

Tomorrow I shall comment on the Government’s recent proposal to sell ‘Shari’ah bonds’ to Muslim investors.

8.15am: Arrive Palace of Westminster. First duty: Go to corridor where cash machines and disposable tights dispenser are. Stop next to the paracetamol vendor, punch in various letters and numbers, stick in credit card and obtain congestion card ticket. No discounts for bio-fuel cars!

Phone call from some strange alien being. Turns out to be my PA who has lost her voice and can’t come in. Disaster. Got to do it all myself. My excellent Parliamentary Assistant normally deals with most of my thousand emails, phone calls and letters which come in each week. I contemplate dealing with the deluge on my own but luckily a knight in shining armour comes to my rescue. The youngest Conservative Councillor in England, Thomas Pursglove is visiting and offers to help out. He is chained to the office desk until 6.15pm and we cope with most constituency problems.

Next to the Table Office. I am putting in five Parliamentary Questions relating to the Department of Work and Pensions, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Northern Ireland. This highly skilled group of professionals live in a little cubby hole behind Mr Speaker’s Chair. Their job is to check that questions are in order and can be fired at the Minister. To my amazement all five questions are accepted without query.

Time running by, a quick cup of coffee and cheese and biscuits and it’s time for prayers. Every daily session of Parliament opens with prayers in the chamber. I am pleased to say we still use the proper version of the Lord’s Prayer. No modern stuff there.

Then to Questions to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. One of the most important parts of the Parliamentary day where the Secretary of State has to answer questions from Members of Parliament. Today boring and uninformative, Secretary of State Balls gives long winded detailed answers which bear no relationship to the questions asked.

Then to a statement on the bugging of an MP’s telephone conversation. Delivered by one of the Government’s best performers Lord Chancellor Jack Straw. Statements are made on urgent matters of national importance and gives MPs the chance to quiz the Minister on whatever crisis they are dealing with. Jack Straw as usual answers with good humour and in detail but I notice he totally dodges my question on how many MPs have been bugged.

6:15: Time to be at 1 Whitehall Place, National Liberal Club where the Conservative Party is awarding its Excellence Awards. I know we’re keen on catching Liberal votes but occupying their building seems like taking things too far.

My Blackberry buzzes to tell me that there will be no more votes in the House of Commons tonight. Great, can settle down to nice evening with constituents. Just meeting with David Cameron, Blackberry goes off again: Vote now, sorry we got previous message wrong. David Cameron says: ‘Hello Peter’. I cut him off and as I run past shouting ‘Got to vote now!’

Whitehall Place is a mile from the Palace of Westminster. MPs have eight minutes to vote in a division. Now, I am more of a marathon runner than a sprinter. But if you saw a group dressed in suits running down the Embankment, I would have been one of them. Flying through the gates at Westminster, a policeman cheerfully shouts: ‘Do you know a division is going on Mr Bone?’ Too out of breath to reply I get into the Division Lobby just before the doors are locked. Unfortunately all the effort was in vain. We still lost the division by a mile.

10.20pm: In the Chamber to support the redoubtable Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour Member for Crewe and Nantwich. Together we both object to a Government guillotine on European Scrutiny. It only delays for 24 hours the Government’s reduction in the time for democratic debate. But we make our point.

And so to bed.

Driving down the M1 on Sunday night on my way to Westminster I was reflecting on the weekend gone by. Oh and before you start, my car is bio fuel and so I am apparently saving the planet and not destroying it.  Interesting that Wellingborough has only one of nineteen bio fuel pumps in the country.  You would think that if the government were serious about Global Warming, they would provide some fiscal incentive to encourage its use.

I had just stopped at the M&S at the Toddington motorway services to stock up with bread, milk, ham and fruit for the week ahead.  M&S on the service station is about the only good thing you can say about them – still, back to my thoughts.  

That morning, my wife Jennie and seven year old son Thomas were attending the Civic Service at Wellingborough School, nothing unusual to say about that as the previous weekend it had been the Holocaust Memorial Day service plus the homeless awareness service at the Full Gospel Church in Rushden. 

Anyway, back to the service.  We had a particularly good sermon from the school chaplain and we were mid way through prayers, you know praying for the government (they certainly need it), local councillors and other civic leaders, when suddenly out of the blue, we were praying for our other son Alex who at that very moment was flying off to Afghanistan as an RAF pilot.  I could see my wife’s eyes glistening and a mixture of pride and foreboding came over me. 

Isn’t it weird that our newspapers on Sunday were not full of information about the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, but about an MP that allegedly fiddled his expenses? 

Got to stop now, as I need to ring a constituent who is about to be made homeless…