No One Here Gets Out

In the House of Lords canteen there is a Door. This Door leads on to the terrace that overlooks the river. There is a sign on the Door which explains that it is usually for the use of Officers of the House, a designation that comes with having worked at the place for a certain amount of time above a certain grade. The term “Officer of the House” doesn’t really count for much these days; the perks have dried up rather, to the extent that colleagues I asked last night were hard pressed to think of any that still exist—other than the right to use that particular Door.

At the end of the last day of term, before we moved on to a Polish restaurant for our unofficial end-of-year meal, several of us were in the canteen, which also serves as the overspill area for the tiny bar. Both canteen and bar have recently been renovated, in the same style in which schools and churches were converted to residential in the late 1990s: strip everything, lay a pine floor and paint everything that’s left bright white. This makes for a nice bright shiny canteen, but a crap place to drink.

So we’re sat in what feels like Terence Conran’s garage, when we hear an angry raised voice from the group of people sitting near the Door. We don’t pay too much heed, as they have clearly been drinking for a while. Just boisterous, we think. But then the voice is raised again. “Lock it behind them!” it’s bellowing. It belongs to a man on the edge of the group, older than his companions; he is treating his department to the delights of a relaxing Christmas drink in his presence. “You are not Officers of the House!” he is yelling in rage. “That Door is for Officers of the House only!”

Since its renovation, the bar has been non-smoking. As the Door is the only barrier between the terrace and patrons of the bar who smoke, they have been nipping out of it to gasp in the cold night air. Many of them have not been Officers of the House, and that is the cause of this man’s apoplexy. Someone tells me his name, and things begin to make sense.

He’s in his 50s. He’s a senior member of staff with a fearsome reputation but, from watching his performance last night, it really isn’t deserved. You don’t want to cross him, is the consensus, but I don’t see how that could be anything but riotously entertaining. He yelled and yelled. I wish I could report more of what he actually said, but I was so astonished at the spectacle I completely forgot to pay attention to the actual words he employed. He forced two female members of staff to leave the bar and walk a circuitous route through the building to get to their designated door—on to the exact same stretch of terrace. Bright scarlet, he barked the rules at everyone around him. He is, after all, an Officer of the House himself, and he was genuinely, profoundly upset at the sacrilege being inflicted on his Door. His rage was splendid. He was incandescent.

And he was wrong. Us peasants can use that very Door to reach the terrace on non-sitting Fridays and, get this, the last day of term. If anyone around him knew this, though, they weren’t saying. At his command they would obediently go and lock the Door behind the latest smoker to pop out of the canteen. After a while the smoker would return, rattle the handle bemusedly, and someone from another table would patiently go and unlock it. A stream of invective and imprecations would ensue, and a minion would get up and lock the Door again. My God, he was furious. We left him to it.

A finer example of a pram being de-toyed I have not seen this year, and, with only 11 days to go, I’m unlikely to. I haven’t seen such a pathetic display from a grown man since the time I saw that filthy old tramp asleep in Piccadilly Circus ticket hall with his cock out, and he at least had the excuse of obviously being a lifelong alcoholic. I truly haven’t seen someone so determined to wallow in their tiny puddle of power, so utterly oblivious to their own ignominy, since I was at school. Although that might just be because I was never in the army.