Twenty years ago, a group of protesting lesbians abseiled into the House of Lords. They were in good company. The Spectator's Robin Laurance reviews John Mortimer's In Other Words:

[T]he book is almost worth its inflated price for an anecdote about Lord Arran. He introduced into the House of Lords both the Sexual Offences Bill ‘which permitted men of a certain age to be as friendly as they liked’ and a bill for the preservation of badgers. As he lay dying, he asked a friend at his bedside why it was that the House of Lords had been packed full, with peers almost falling out of the public gallery, ‘when I passed my buggers bill, but almost completely empty except for a few old earls when I passed my badgers bill’. It took his friend to remind him that there are very few badgers in the House of Lords.