It was a bizarre election, with 12 candidates, and a tortuous and previously untried electoral process in which MPs spent most of a day walking through the division lobbies to vote for or against each candidate, one after another.

Amid heated exchanges in the division lobbies, the Tories claimed that government whips struck a deal with Labour backbenchers in which they were given free rein to preserve their £24,000 additional costs allowance while voting down an above-inflation pay increase.

Not one of the North Wales MPs who meekly trotted along with the government into the division lobbies last week had had the courage to inform us prior to the event that they believed passionately that these wasteful, ludicrous, anachronistic and antisocial institutions should be closed forthwith if not torched and razed and their parasitical occupants thrown into jail as a lesson to all, and would therefore feel bound by conscience to vote for their abolition as a matter of extreme urgency.