Vanishing Dougie

Good story in The Times’s People column today.

It seems wee Dougie Alexander had gone missing when he was due to make an emergency statement on Burma in the Commons yesterday.

And amazingly the Speaker or whichever of his deputies was in the Chair suspended the sitting for five minutes while he was hunted down.

In the good old days, before Labour started abolishing all Parliamentary tradition, the Speaker would have moved on to next business, and when the wee laddie did turn up he would have got a pretty severe reprimand.

Conservative Ministers were always told in no uncertain terms that Parliament was sovereign, and if they were required to attend, then attend they did and punctually.   All their civil servant staff understood that, and made sure their Minister stuck by the rules.