I remember attending a book launch given on the Commons Terrace a week after 9/11: security was at its height as my fellow guests – many of them pillars of the establishment themselves – spoke of the possibilities of a terrorist attack on the Mother of Parliaments, by air or by boat; the body politic incarnate now a defensive site. That night, as I was walked its endless corridors past committee rooms and chambers, it was hard not to invest each with their own dramatic narrative, inflected with secondhand memories of Airey Neave’s assassination by the IRA in 1979 – his car blown up on car park ramp – to tales of rent boys being given midnight tours of the nation’s debating rooms by their uxorious sugar daddies.

Yet within this overblown version of a suburban villa – expanded ad infiniteum in its repeating arches – the machinations of Great Britain still take place, convened in endless committees and dark decisions while listless Oxbridge graduates operate as MPs assistants and catering staff cook up a Gormenghast-like storm, lacking only Peake’s Swelter to swing his butcher’s axe. Even now, even with its changed ‘family friendly’ hours, Westminster is a tradition as engrained as the Victorian pollution which still gives its faÁade a carbonised chiarscuro. It is still one great Pall Mall club, its terraces colour-coded between Lord and Commons, a democracy-defying diachotomy which rumour renders a venue of venal lobbying, coursed with influence and lucre through the anterior veins of its corridors and connective tissue of its cell-like chambers – the private dining rooms with their even darker panelled walls; places in which intrigue might yet foment and plots hatch over a fine burgundy.

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