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He was deft at piloting Bills, but less good at party knockabout, being accused of ‘floating like a bee and stinging like a butterfly‘
Lord Selkirk of Douglas, who has died aged 81, was a socially liberal lawyer and aristocrat who was a hard-working Conservative MP for Edinburgh West for 23 years, a Scottish Office minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and finally a front-bench spokesman in the Scottish Parliament.
THE design for a statue of a leading suffragette has been unveiled in Newport.
It was the speech he was never allowed to give — but it encapsulated his political beliefs as an opponent of the unelected House of Lords. When Anthony Wedgwood Benn was forced to give up his seat in the House of Commons in 1960 on inheriting his father’s title, he urged the Speaker to let him address MPs on the need to eradicate hereditary peerage — his own especially. He was refused permission but the speech was later published in a book. ‘I am asking that the Stansgate peerage . . . should be allowed to lapse completely and for all time — preserving no privileges for the future,â...