We returned to the House of Lords this week for another great two-day set-piece Article 50 Brexit debate, when the bill reached its committee stage in the upper chamber. The European question, the most unsettling weather system the British political climate can generate, fell upon us last week, with nearly 200 peers speaking by the time we had finished. It resumed again on Monday and Wednesday.

From the start of the debate the metabolic rate of the most tranquil of legislative chambers rose fast and high, propelled still further upward by the presence on the first day of the Prime Minister, Theresa May, and, later, of the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, sitting on the steps in front of the throne used by the Queen at the state openings of Parliament, as they are allowed to do as members of the Privy Council.