The Palace of Westminster is crumbling. Strolling through its jumbled quadrangles and spiky porticos, Bagehot often marvels at the confidence, ambition and Victorian creepiness they exude. He also notes, spreading like sweat-patches through the damp masonry, from rusted Victorian pipework and bodged Victorian stonework, innumerable black stains, caused by rainwater, air pollution, or worse. The vaulted ceiling of the members' entrance, one of the palace's finest carved chambers, is becoming discoloured and rotted by effluent from a leaky toilet above it. Are the fates conspiring to dump excrement, as a tabloid newspaper editor once promised John Major, onto the heads of Britain's elected representatives? It seems they are. To restore the palace, according to a recent report, could cost £7 billion ($11 billion) which, in a time of welfare cuts and no love for politicians, is unavailable. Even if it were, it is hard to imagine the Conservative government, whose leader, David Cameron, shares his party's aversion to grand solutions, embracing the project. And yet, plead the report's authors, Tory make-do and muddle-through, which has served the physical and constitutional architecture of Britain's democracy pretty well, won't work. Gargoyles and other blackened edifices of Parliament are thumping to the ground.
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