When we leave the EU, the Government should focus on the House of Lords, says FERGUS KELLY

Its votes over the past week, especially its demand that steps be taken to negotiate a new customs union with the EU, were an explicit demonstration of peers’ intention to derail Brexit, and a very pointed two-fingered salute at Leave voters.

The Lords are the ermine- trimmed Remain establishment, in the vanguard of the movement I dubbed last week, Look What You Stupid People Have Done now.

Its chamber is a retirement home for either time-servers or those kicked out by the voters.

The same sort of people who could once have relied on being appointed a European Commissioner in return for being rejected at the ballot box.

Ever since Blair kicked out the vast majority of the hereditary peers at the end of the last century, there has been all manner of reform proposals, from making it elected (which would put it on a direct collision course with the commons) to slashing its size.

In the meantime instead, the place has filled to bursting with the sort of dross you wouldn’t draw your curtains to watch speak in your back garden.

The House of Commons can reflect the voters’ will more directly than it has been able to in decades post-Brexit.

And it will no longer need the chamber of waxworks down the corridor.

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And David Bowie still at No 1 with Let’s Dance, someone who I then regarded as an elder statesman, though I’ve since calculated he was only 36 at the time?

Check. Yes, it’s Top Of The Pops 1983, which thanks to the invariably excellent BBC Four, remains one of my viewing joys of the week.

My 20-year-old son often enjoys casting his eye over the re-runs when he’s here too, though not for the same reasons.

Instead he takes pleasure in expressing disbelief that anyone can have chosen to look like that.

Well, yes we did.

And, more to the point, you’re going to experience exactly the same sense of incredulity when you look back on TOTP’s contemporary equivalents in about 30 years’ time.

Why else do you think I watch it?

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I’ve never had particularly strong feelings one way or the other about Charles and Camilla.

Despite the extraordinary circumstances leading up to their marriage, it’s not as if two divorced people have never remarried before, and I fail to understand why she won’t be Queen if and when he becomes King. But, if the idea of co-operating with the ITV documentary about Camilla this week was to improve her image, I’d say it was a success.

She came over as likeable, thoughtful and unfussy.

And, given that Charles’s tendency to sound off on issues could prove more contentious once he’s on the throne, she might end up winning a few more admirers for being the commonsense counterweight he will require.