Writing as a former adviser to Airey Neave and friend of Ian Gow, Alistair Lexden issued the following statement on August 6.

For some years, there has been concern — voiced frequently in the media — about the size of the House of Lords.

On 30 July, after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women, the judge told Charlie Elphicke, the former MP for Dover, that he faced “the very real possibility” of a jail sentence.

Britain’s pride in its expanding Empire in the nineteenth century led unsurprisingly to calls for the erection of  grand and imposing memorials to it in the imperial capital, London.

The Labour Party swept to power at the 1945 general election. Huge changes followed, particularly in the further development of the welfare state which had been brought to quite an advanced point by Neville Chamberlain in 1930s (now largely forgotten).

In an oral question in the Lords on 22 July, Alistair Lexden asked: “since social distancing could have been arranged so easily at the outset, was it really necessary to lock up all our churches for the first time since Pope Innocent III ordered their closure 800 years ago?”

Shortly before his death in 1960, Sir Lewis Namier was hailed at Oxford University as “the creator of the science of modern history who has never forgotten to treat history as an art.” An outstanding biography of him has been published by Professor David Hayton of Queen’s University, Belfast.

The following letter was published in The Daily Telegraph on July 16.

SIR - Charles Moore (Comment, July 14) urges us to visit Battle Abbey in Sussex and savour its delights.

In a recent book review in The Spectator magazine, Alan Johnson, the former Labour cabinet minister, claimed that the first newspaper to sell a million copies was the Daily Herald, then the voice of the Labour Party, in late 1930s. In fact the first paper to pass the million mark was the Tory-sup

Robert Clive (1725-74) rose from obscurity in Shropshire to acquire fame and fortune in India. He was a most gifted military commander.