Parliament: The Sketch - Two men trying to pass on a narrow mountain ledge

"WOULD THE Prime Minister agree with me that this is a great day for democracy?" asked Gillian Merron, first up in Prime Minister's Questions. She was referring to the Government's White Paper on reform of the House of Lords but the more pious-minded might have felt her remark was incidentally borne out by the 15 minutes that followed, an uncharacteristically grave and courteous exchange between the party leaders. The less pious-minded might have asked for their money back. I felt a pang of sympathy for those in the public gallery, who must have felt as you do when you've set the video for The Fast Show and get back to find that you've accidentally recorded a particularly dull passage of Newsnight. This sort of thing is all very well now and then, particularly if you worry about the intellectual reputation of the Mother of Parliaments, but if you care at all about attendance figures for Westminster's most popular cabaret session you would have to hope that aberrant rationality would soon pass.

It did, naturally - a Tory question about interest rates finally breaking the spell cast by the subject of Northern Ireland. As William Hague tried to persuade the House that the prisoner release programme should be suspended and Mr Blair insisted on the opposite they acted with the meticulous civility of two men trying to pass each other on a narrow mountain ledge. Lose your footing on a matter of bipartisan agreement and you look bad all the way down. But when Mr Blair was finally knocked back into default mode and pulled out the rubber truncheon ("No more boom and bust!") there was an eruption of pent-up mockery from Tory backbenchers. They had sat patiently through the violin duet but now the clowns were back on and they were determined to make up for lost time.

Over in the Lords the hereditary peers were listening to Baroness Jay confirm their order of execution. In his reply to her statement Lord Strathclyde had expressed the hope that they would be spared "trite and facile denigration of this House and its members", a plaintive request from the condemned that the tumbril should travel in silence and that its occupants would not be pelted with ordure by the common mob. Baroness Young rose to note that this was a "very sad day for the House".

Baroness Young can imbue the word "modernisation" with such revulsion that you might imagine it was a sexual practice too disgusting for voluntary participation in it to be thinkable, but she was right about the melancholy of the occasion - a sense that for many peers a personal sense of mortality had coincided with the moment a venerable part of the constitution prepared to breathe its last.

Baroness Thatcher, in funereal black for the occasion, nodded gravely as Lady Young spoke. And, true to the spirit of noblesse oblige, some venerable members were already fretting about their retainers. "Is the noble lady aware that many of us have been here for a long time", began Lord Longford, a faintly absurd prelude given that he looks as if he's been receiving his attendance allowance since the Crimean War.

Lord Longford wasn't worried about his own future, it turned out, but those of the long-serving staff. Baroness Jay reassured him that they would be fully employed looking after the life peers. Lord Gifford was almost the last to speak, asking whether the Royal Commission might consider renaming the Upper Chamber as the House of Senators and for the first time there was a faint mutter of revulsion from the Conservative benches. As it happened, Lord Strathclyde had already offered a better title for the awkward constitutional amphibian that will now painfully haul itself on to dry land - he called it Halfway House.