It has taken two decades but Andrew Lloyd Webber has realised that the House of Lords isn’t for him. The theatre impresario is to quit as a Tory peer, having turned up to parliament to vote with the frequency that I cut our garden hedge. He is going to be even busier in future, apparently, and having voted just 41 times since 1997, he has announced he is stepping down. Don’t cry for him though: all through his wild days, his mad existence, he kept his privileged place at the heart of our democracy and only now, having realised that “what is expected from a member today is very different from what it was when I joined the house in 1997”, he has decided to…

Source: The Times October 17, 2017 07:52 UTC