Lord Moore of Etchingham: My Lords, I shall just add to that, supporting the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, and the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, because it helps to answer an important point that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, raised earlier, which is that the convention in this House is that we try to implement, or not to impede, manifesto commitments. What is clear about the Bill as it is drafted,...
Lord Moore of Etchingham: My Lords, I listened with great interest to what the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, had to say and I sympathised with the anguish he felt as a loyal Conservative supporter trying to deal with the problem the Government have presented him with. As a non-affiliated Peer I do not have that problem, but I share his anxiety about what the Government have done as it seems very vacillating and unhelpful....
Lord Moore of Etchingham: My Lords, I cannot call the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, my noble friend because I am non-affiliated, but outside this House, I call him my friend. He has been my friend for 45 years. I can testify that his well-known nickname is correct and that he does have double the cerebral capacity of the rest of us, so we should all listen very carefully to anything he has to say. However, although he...
Lord Moore of Etchingham: Sorry, my Lords, I would just like to say that I did not use that term.
Lord Moore of Etchingham: My Lords, in following the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, I speak as a new boy. I will perhaps give an impression of what it feels like to come into the House and look at its timetable. The pattern of the week reminds me slightly of the nursery rhyme: “Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to...
Lord Moore of Etchingham: My Lords, like many noble Lords, and indeed like the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, who has just spoken—my instincts are as he expressed—I have a certain prejudice against this Bill. That is how I originally approached this matter. I felt that free speech is so deep-rooted in the life of our universities that it needs no legal protection. I feared that statutory intervention in this area...
Lord Moore of Etchingham: My Lords, I have been affected by the debate this evening. I was intending to speak—if I was going to speak at all—in a rather different way, because I have anxieties about the way that the Government introduced this legislation, at the point when they brought in all the material about the form of election. But I have been stirred by the other side of the argument, because something that...
Lord Moore of Etchingham: I thank the noble Baroness for that and accept what she says. I am thinking more widely of the debate—
Lord Moore of Etchingham: I listened closely to the noble Lord’s speech, and it is perfectly true that he made a very long and important argument about the specifics, but he also expressed a general preference for proportional representation. I wish to make a very simple point, which I think came across very well in what the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said. He described how, even under the strict chairmanship of Lord...
Lord Moore of Etchingham: My Lords, I must thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for his particularly generous remarks about my late father. I was very touched by them, and I will return to them because they are relevant to the theme of my speech today. I must first apologise to this House for my delay in making this speech. I have spent my life as a newspaper editor, journalist and writer and we of course...
