Lords Sketch: Former captain shows powers are undiminished

First Edition

LORD HOWE has grown woollier on top since he left the Commons. In his resignation speech he had made a devastating swipe at Mrs Thatcher by comparing negotiating in Europe with her as Prime Minister to being sent to the crease with a broken bat.

Yesterday he attempted another cricketing metaphor and it went sadly wrong. At school he had only been good enough to be long-stop - a position which no longer exists - and a referendum on Maastricht would be like picking up the ball on the boundary in extra time and expecting to replay the whole game. Instead he wanted to play cricket in the European competition and . . . oh dear, he'd lost it completely.

Yesterday's debate on a Maastricht treaty referendum was one of those celebrity cricket matches, British XI vs Maastricht XI. A handful of still useful veterans and the odd younger player better known from some other walk of life.

It was easy to tell who was on which side: the British XI, who wanted a referendum, seemed, on the whole, to be thin, while the Maastricht team were, by and large, portly.

Lord Tonypandy, batting high up for Britain, rolled back the years. He was the expansive Welsh Methodist preacher, speaking of the dangers of 'selling the heritage'.

Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, for Maastricht, conveyed the sheer tedious boringness of the legal and constitutional history of Britain's relationship with Europe, citing treaties, solemn affirmations, repercussional effects. It could have been 1975.

Lord Lawson, thinner perhaps than in his Commons days, was still on the Maastricht side of the debate, as long as we had an opt-out from monetary union. Meanwhile, Baroness Thatcher ruffled ominously through the thick orange folder on her knee.

Baroness Castle, slender and anti-federal in spite of her years as an MEP, read from the Tory manifesto to show there was no mandate for Maastricht. By now the chamber was barely half full and as is the nature of the Upper House, there had been not an order paper waved, scarcely a 'hear, hear', indeed barely a movement among the ranks of non-speaking backwoods peers.

After nearly three hours, on she came, the player everyone wanted. And astonishingly her powers seemed undiminished, the familiar blue-suited figure surrounded by a sea of grey. Her noble friend Lord Lawson had made an 'excellent speech', she said. She praised her other noble friend, Lord Howe.

And then she stepped up a gear. She had not only read the Maastricht treaty, she had read every debate about it, every committee, and she, a pro-European, was appalled at the potential loss of sovereignty. We must trust the people, and let them decide.

Of course this won't be disloyal to John Major's government, she argued. You could almost believe she meant it. But it wasn't so much what she said, as the presence she brought. It was like suddenly hitting the veterans with a West Indian fast bowler in his prime.

As with those invitation cricket matches, the result isn't really the important thing. But the spectators go away thinking what a poor lot the present team is.