Lord Bonkers' Diary: “May it please your Majesty [boing]"

I would have more confidence in this otherwise unrecorded episode of history if Lord Bonkers hadn't once told me a similar tale about Enoch Powell and his pogo stick.

Saturday

Neither Ed Davey nor even Andrew Bonar Law was the first member of parliament to take up bungee jumping. The accolade belongs to William Lenthall, that most celebrated of Commons Speakers, in the days when the ropes were made from the entrails of oxen. 

So keen on the activity was Lenthall, he would sometimes leap from the rafters of the Palace of Westminster while presiding over the House. Thus, his famous reply when Charles I turned up mob-handed to arrest the five members should be rendered as: 

“May it please your Majesty, [boing] I have neither eyes to see [boing] nor tongue to speak in this place [boing] but as the House is pleased to direct me, [boing] whose servant I am here.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• We drank the Bonkers’ Arms dry
• Practising with the Elves of Rockingham Forest
• Some unfair coverage in the tabloid press
• The woods, meadows and hedgerows of the Bonkers Hall Estate
• I've been running my eye over our new MPs