A rare example of a welcome parliamentary innovation has been the decision to hire several skilled photographers to take pictures of the dramatic goings-on inside the Commons chamber. The Times carried one such image yesterday. It showed the preening Speaker, John Bercow, at the centre and MPs clustered around in the half-light during the latest Brexit dust-up. So striking was the image that it attracted considerable comment, comparing it to paintings from the Renaissance.

The artist it immediately put me in mind of, though, was William Hogarth, the 18th-century English satirist whose prints chronicled the greed, incompetence and decay of the politics of his period in popular caricatures. The spectacle at disintegrating Westminster right now is horribly Hogarthian. Consider the antediluvian, orotund warblings of the