It was a scene unprecedented within that hallowed chamber. When the Speaker announced that Billing was to be ‘suspended from the service of the House’, Billing refused to move. The sitting was suspended, and officers were summoned to remove him. The incident – which has its echo in the 1980s when Michael Hestletine seized the ceremonial mace and earned his nickname of ‘Tarzan’ – was described with glee by the Daily Mail: ‘The Speaker left the House, with several Members following him. The mace was removed from the table. Four messengers in evening dress, and wearing their gold chains of office, came in from the Lobby and closed round Mr Billing, the Serjeant -at-Arms directing operations from behind. (He did not draw his sword.) Mr Billing struggled hard, but the odds were against him. Two attendants seized a leg each, and two an arm each, and with a desperate wrench they got the member out of his corner and carried him feet first through the door, while other members laughed and cheered.’

The spectacle was redolent of Alice in Wonderland. ‘The last the House saw of Mr Billing, through the swinging doors, was a scene of kicking legs and a flop on the floor of the Lobby. Fortunately the flop was on thick coco-nut mat and not on the hard tiles. In his struggles Mr Billing had grasped the shirt-front of one of his bearers and disarranged his Court dress. He also kicked another on the wrist. Thereupon they dropped him.‘9 But this farce had a darker side: Lloyd George was told that Billing ‘was carried out shouting “intern the Aliens”’, while Billing’s supporters proclaimed ‘the crass stupidity of the Government in suspending Pemberton Billing has brought us nearer revolution than all previous acts combined of our subsidised marionettes. You would do well to sound public opinion, not the opinion of the camouflaged German Jews, of the monocled, eunuch-voiced inefficients who mince or waddle from Whitehall to the Clubs… That the traitors know what to expect is seen by the fact that the Statue of King Charles in Whitehall is now a machine gun emplacement’ – a vision be reflected in virtual histories of SS stormtroopers marching over Westminster Bridge and Cold War fantasies of Parliament as a site for invasion from above, from Professor Quatermass to Dr Who.10

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