Interesting Facts

27th April 1124 – David I became King of Scotland. 1296 – The Scots were defeated by Edward I of England at the Battle of Dunbar. 1667 – The blind and impoverished John Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10. 1773 – The Parliament of Great Britain passed the Tea Act, designed to save the British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on the North American tea trade. They were not a Fair Trade company. 1791 - Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the Morse code, was born. 1840 – The foundation stone for new Palace of Westminster, London, was laid. 1992 – Betty Boothroyd became the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons in its 700-year history.

According to a Freedom of Information request from the Evening Standard newspaper a committee of British MPs has spent around £250,000 since 1995 commissioning portraits and statues of other MPs. (Now no one would really begrudge Sir Winston a statue or two, and even a prime minister like Mrs T should have her photo taken for the wall of infamy, but pictures and statues have also been commissioned for junior ministers and backbenchers. Frank Doran, Labour MP and chairman of the Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art said, "We've been collecting art in the House of Commons, and Parliament generally, since the 14th century.  We're preserving the history of Parliament through art. We're also doing a number of other things as part of that process: one is supporting young artists.")

According to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Telegraph , the most borrowed book from the House of Commons library in 2012 was How to be an MP, by Paul Flynn. (The complete list is:- How to be an MP, by Paul Flynn. How Parliament Works, by Robert Rogers The new few, or a very British Oligarchy, by Ferdinand Mount Losing small wars: British military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Frank Ledwidge Erskine May’s treastise on the law, privileges, proceedings and usage of Parliament, edited by Malcolm Jack Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol 4, by Robert Caro Outside in, by Peter Hain A Journey, by Tony Blair Chavs, by Owen Jones Back from the brink, by Alistair Darling But the winning book had only been borrowed 19 times, I personally think that says more about our MPs than anything else.)