In an article in The Times on February 7, Daniel Finkelstein urged the Conservative Party to support the reduction of the voting age to sixteen, a change with far-reaching implications backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

On 5 February, the Lords held an important debate to mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 which gave the vote to a limited number of women for the first time.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has incurred much criticism for his failure to accept recommendations in the report of Lord Carlile of Berriew QC on the case of Bishop Bell, which he himself commissioned.

At the end of January,the National Portrait Gallery announced that, for the first time in twenty years, a portrait of Thomas Carlyle slashed by cleaver-wielding suffragette in 1914 was to be put on display.

On January 24, The Times reported that the Democratic Unionist Party wanted “ a 25-mile bridge or tunnel” (costing some £20 billion) between Northern Ireland and Scotland—in addition to the £1 billion in extra public spending agreed last year under its deal with the government.

After telling the readers of The Times what he thought about the statue of Margaret Thatcher designed for Parliament Square (see below), Alistair Lexden criticised it strongly again in the London Evening Standard on 26 January.

Alistair Lexden is a member of the George Bell Group, which was formed after the Church of England decided in 2015 to pay compensation to an unnamed woman who claimed to have been sexually abused by Bishop George Bell, a towering figure in the history of the Christian Church, when she was a young

For some months, a plan to erect a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square has been under discussion.

A recent episode of the popular Netflix series on the royal family featured Prince Charles’s schooldays at Gordonstoun. Was he badly treated? Alistair Lexden quoted words written by the Prince in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph on January 8.

On December 29, an article in The Times carried the headline ‘Princess Anne crowned busiest royal’. This was seriously misleading, as Alistair Lexden made clear to the newspaper. It was, he said, the head of her brother that ought to have been adorned.