Faerie palace or demon’s lair, the Commons polarises as an acute paradox: a place of the people yet ultimately exclusive. It may yet wither under the media spotlight, or even under the microscopic examination of David Moore’s lens. Through its daily appearance on our TV news, the building fades into political wallpaper, its architecture a shorthand for political discourse, serious TV (one recent BBC political strand used an animated version of Westminster reconfigured as a prehistoric monster; that sense of monstrousness once more). We see it so often in bulletins and rain-soaked political vox pops and pieces-to-camera from Parliament Green that the Palace recedes into a kind of generic gothic bluescreen, as much a CGI effect as a real building. So much more powerful, then, the intrusion of David Moore’s forensic images as they pathologise the textures of that interior, painted and polished, scuffed and scratched. These are charged spaces, still echoing with speeches, just as the universe still echoes with the sound of human history. The perorations of nearly two centuries hanging in the air here, just as Marconi believed he could hear the voices of the dead from his telegraph listening station – the drowning cries of long-dead seamen still reverberating in the ether.

And these are the ironies which we inherit. The building may represent the will of the people, but the logo of Westminster – the medieval portcullis – speaks of defence and barred ways, antipathetic to the notion of democratic access. This is where David Moore comes in. His photographs take us into those chambers and under the seats; into the grain, as it were, examining, disinterring, preparing a visual autopsy of democracy; in his own words, ‘an act of insolence in a period of absolute decadence.‘12 And here, under the Prime Minister’s microphone, we find a lump of chewing gum. Which is where Peter and I came in.

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