Royal Gallery: Restoration
Debate between Lord Morgan and Lord Sewel
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.