Bleak House

It takes seven years to know your way around Parliament. That’s what I was told when I arrived in the Commons press gallery seven years ago, but I am still none the wiser about how to get from the Snake Pit to the North Curtain Corridor, and have only recently discovered the location of the Yellow Submarine. As a building, the Palace of Westminster is a confusing, contradictory rabbit warren of underground corridors, secret briefing rooms at the top of towers and rooms with strange names. The very fabric of the building is dysfunctional, with pieces of masonry falling onto cars, and mice creeping through kitchens.

Winston Churchill famously said that ‘we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us’ — which perhaps explains why the inhabitants of one of the best-known buildings in the world lead such dysfunctional lives. Marriages disintegrate within years of an MP entering the House of Commons; addictions are easy to develop and just as easy to hide; mental illness is so prevalent that Parliament has had to set up a special treatment service.