House of Lords: Press Office

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted that the Chairman of Committees is going to respond to this debate. No one is held in higher regard. He is the epitome of the great public servant and I hope that, following this debate, he will assemble a small group of your Lordships to discuss these issues and advise him as to how we can best project a positive image. It is up to us. There will always be annoying stories about champagne and other things. You only have to go to Buckingham Palace at the moment to see the Rowlandson exhibition to find that we are not the first public servants to be the butt of cruel humour and salacious yarns.

This House is a very positive institution, but the trouble is that people out there do not understand it. I would even say that people down there, in another place, do not understand it. They do not fully appreciate what we do and why we do it, or what our role is. What we have to do—I hope with the aid of the Chairman of Committees—is to extend the Peers in Schools initiatives, so that we can go into all manner of institutions to try to explain what this House does.

The people who know most about politics, it is sometimes said, are the London taxi drivers. Well, some of them do, but in the last couple of months I have had four or five who have brought me here and who have not had a clue what we do. When I have told them, they have been amazed and surprised. I have had two of them have tea with me in the House, and I think they went away with a very much more positive impression of this great institution—and it is a great institution. It is part of Parliament and is not going to be upended in the immediate future, so we have to project a positive image as often as we possibly can.