In June 1916, a national hero, Lord Kitchener, was drowned off the Orkneys.  Official documents, recording what happened, remained classified for far too long. Now the full story has been told in a fine book by David Laws, the former Lib Dem minister in David Cameron’s coalition government.

In Alistair Lexden’s judgement, the Conservative Party is now facing the greatest crisis in its long history. Sadly, this government has failed to meet the huge challenge that Brexit created; the consequences have been disastrous.

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.