The Commons: little prospect of reform?

I had to go down to the Commons yesterday to interview David Miliband. The Foreign Secretary was stranded in his office, held up by the election of the Speaker.

I am blessed with a Commons pass – largely so that I can evade the bolt cutters of the Metropolitan police and park my bike on the free-for-all racks under Big Ben.

I was armed with a room number and a vague location “behind the Speaker’s Chair”.

But finding the Foreign Secretary’s premises was no easy task.

The room number was followed by a letter – it turned out that the run of numbers of rooms at the Commons does not run in mathematical sequence.

My search for Mr Miliband took me down one corridor and up another.

I passed faces I knew but who gave no hint of recognition; and faces I didn’t know who seemed to know me.

It felt a dangerous escapade.

I expected arrest at any moment, uncertain of which corridor I could venture down and which I could not.

And that ever present danger that at any moment I might take a turn amongst the Pugin hangings that would land me not “behind the Speaker’s Chair”, but in front of it.

Spend half an hour down there, and I don’t recommend it, you come out feeling you have stepped into an Alice in Wonderland World.

My overwhelming and depressing sense is that it has no prospect of reforming itself, and thus very little prospect of it in turn reforming the British constitution – let alone writing one.

The most comforting moment? Re-entering the real world, to the policeman’s whistle on the gate and his call, “pedestrians, make way for the cyclist!”