Widespread outrage has been expressed about the Brunei government’s introduction of Sharia law, under which homosexuals can be stoned to death.

On 11 April, Alistair Lexden emphasised the abhorrence felt across the House of Lords in the last oral question before the Easter recess.

Having raised the key areas of discrimination suffered by cohabiting sibling couples in an oral question in the Lords on 21 March (see below), Alistair Lexden pursued them further through written questions to the Treasury.

Alistair Lexden’s letter about the Amritsar massacre a hundred years ago this month, published in The Daily Telegraph on 3 April (see below), drew comments from a reader, Chris Devine.

On 10 April, the Lords approved regulations which provide another five months for discussions on the restoration of devolved government in Northern Ireland. Two and a quarter years have now passed since the Executive at Stormont collapsed.

Each spring Alistair Lexden hosts an awards ceremony on the terrace of the House of Lords for the 24 independent sixth-form colleges which comprise the Council for Independent Education (CIFE), of which he is President. This year’s ceremony was held on 3 April.

As the Brexit crisis deepened still further at the start of April , an earlier Tory crisis was recalled in the media—that caused by Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Alistair Lexden compared the two crises in a letter published in The Times on April 4.

On 13 April 1919 British Indian Army troops under the command of Col. Reginald Dyer fired into a crowd that had gathered in a public garden at Amritsar in the Punjab. All  meetings had been banned. The ban had not , however, been well publicised.

The article below was published on the ConservativeHome website on 30 March. In it, Alistair Lexden reviews a new biography, and writes about his own memories of the man whom he assisted on Northern Ireland issues at a time when terrorists were inflicting so much suffering, not just in Ulster but in other parts of the country too.

In its editorial on 23 March, The Spectator declared that ‘Lord North is one of the few beneficiaries of the May premiership: he is now no longer the worst prime minister in our history.’ In a letter published in the next issue of the magazine on 30 March, Alistair Lexden showed that North was a

The following article, published in Parliament’s House Magazine on 25 March, draws on both Alistair Lexden’s personal recollections and on an admirable biography by Patrick Bishop, written to mark the 40th anniversary of Airey Neave’s murder.