Order and disorder

摘要

THE hardest times came well into the night. At late sittings in the House, mps tended to get rowdy. That was when Michael Martin felt most on his own. He got nervous about his job, which was to keep them all in order, give them permission to speak, stop them from being long-winded, and make them behave. It helped him then to think of the Commons as a great big machine that had to be maintained. As a sheet-metal worker and an engineer, first for the North British Locomotive Company and then for Rolls-Royce, that was a job he knew he was good at.