Lord Bonkers' Diary: Pearly Kings and Queens and Sir Percy Harris

The end of another week at Bonkers Hall, though you can hear the old boy speak in Leicester next Friday. 

Sunday

My peers has been complaining about the catering at the House of Lords; one claims he was left “scarred” after his booking was cancelled and that his wife was “unable to lunch elsewhere” because she was wearing a tiara.

What nonsense! If the first Lady Bonkers and I found there was no table for us we would take a taxi to the East End and dine on pie, mash and liquor or jellied eels, all washed down with draughts of porter, before enjoying a good cockney knees up at the Crippled Canvasser (the haunt, incidentally, of the notorious gangster Violent Bonham-Carter).

My wife was even known to display the latest choreography of the Ballets Russes atop one of the tables there, while an audience of costermongers, chimney sweeps, Pearly Kings and Queens and Sir Percy Harris applauded her. But whatever turn the evening took, she wore her tiara throughout.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West, 1906-10.

Earlier in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Monday: In the shadow of Pendle Hill
Tuesday: Counting the teaspoons
Wednesday: Rabbit in the headlights
Thursday: A future leader of the Liberal Democrats?
Friday: The Great George Street rabbit
Saturday: Do you know the North Koreans?