Royal Gallery: Restoration

Lord Morgan Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Chairman of Committees]

Treading lightly around this question, the serious and core thing is that we are responsible for maintaining the integrity and quality of those murals. It is a challenge; various layers have built up. Some of the problems go back to the very early days of the Building when there was a high level, for instance, of smoke pollution. All that has to be dealt with carefully and delicately. I hear what Members understandably say about how wonderful it would be to do it by next year. I repeat: the much more important objective is to get it right and make sure that we live up to our responsibilities as custodians of this important piece of our heritage.

[Lord Morgan (Lab)]

My Lords, could it not be made clear when we celebrate the Battle of Waterloo that it was an Anglo-German-Dutch victory and the British forces played a fairly small part numerically, although a distinguished one? I declare an interest as one whose press-ganged Welsh ancestor fought at the Battle of Trafalgar.

[The Chairman of Committees]

I do not think that I am going to go through a whole list of British military endeavours and divvy out who did what, where and how.