It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.
Westminster is a piece of this city's energy, something the contemporary world has forgotten.
From Lady Carlisle's trip to Moscow in 1663 to Veronica Atkinson's tour of duty during the 1989 Romanian revolution, it is clear that very little has changed. Four hundred years of innovation, liberation, and improvement clearly bypassed the Foreign Office while making its rounds through Westminster.
After 23 years closeted at Westminster, where often all you can see out of the windows are other parliamentary buildings, I appreciate space, and I retired to Dartmoor to find it.
Mice are everywhere at Westminster but many MPs, including me, did not report them because we were afraid of their possible fate.
Cats are ideal for politicians. I had two when I arrived at Westminster, Sooty and Sweep, who had come with a flat I had bought six years earlier in Fulham from someone who was about to go abroad. There was a better offer ahead of me but she took mine because I would take the cats.
It is a truth universally unacknowledged at Westminster that there is life after politics.
I went to a branch of the City of Westminster College in Maida Vale to do drama, sociology and English literature. I stayed for three or four months.
Westminster is a jungle - and the hunter can always smell fear on its prey.
Public perception of the Westminster arena, with all its posturings, does little to engender a sense of voter belief.
