Apologists for the Lords also like to blather about the supposed superiority of debates in the chamber, but this is just more mythmaking. As anyone who has tried to watch their proceedings knows, peers do not really debate at all, but just take it in turns to read laboriously from prepared texts, often to the accompaniment of snoring around them. The mid-Victorian statesman Sidney Herbert once said that speaking in the Lords was “like addressing sheeted tombstones by moonlight.” Nothing has changed since then.