This arid, fly-blown August has been interrupted by a sermon from something called the Institute of Alcohol Studies.
It claims Parliament is an ‘alcohol-soaked workplace’ where all-day boozing is ‘embedded’ and alcohol has been ‘a driver of harmful behaviours and poor conduct among politicians‘.
The institute, an offshoot of the old Total Abstinence League, may be on to something, although not in the way it imagines.
Westminster does indeed have a hooch problem: In my opinion it does not drink enough.
That, naturally, is not the gist of the report Under the Influence? 38 pages of tight-lipped prose in which the institute denounces our legislature
To provide well-rounded coverage and a breadth of insight across various events, we rely on contributions from several staff writers, each bringing their own area of expertise to our publication.