Bertie Denham as a reader of verse (by Douglas Slater)

Recordings have sprung from all sorts of places. These began in the Office of the Government Chief Whip in the House of Lords in the late 1980s.

Bertie – more formally, The Rt Hon The Lord Denham KBE – wanted an explanation of some political imbroglio from his then Private Secretary (me). I must have been in post for a little while, since I felt sufficiently at ease to begin “Well, Chief Whip, I’ll tell thee everything I can, there’s little to relate …” and he was immediately distracted. There was no shortage of aged aged men in the House of Lords, he pointed out (and at that time of course there wasn’t): which particular gate was this one sitting on?

So we discovered that we both had a more-than-nodding acquaintance with the works of Lewis Carroll. We had already discovered that we were both easily distracted. How we ever got anything done is a mystery, let alone how we managed to organise legislation through the House of Lords. Mostly, it was in a gale of laughter. But there I go again.

I discovered that Bertie had been reciting verse to private audiences for years. So when he retired as Chief Whip (and I left the House), we began to plot how more people might get to hear him. The result was A Thing of Shreds and Patches, a choice of lighter pieces out of Bertie’s vast repertoire, which came out in 2000.

Joanna Lumley added lustre to that recording, in a duet with Bertie in Patrick (Lord) Barrington’s ‘When autumn mists were falling dank’. That, and the Haddock Rap, which is a hidden track (hidden tracks were enjoying a bit of a vogue back then) have become cult classics … minor perhaps, but nevertheless classics with devoted followers who are apt to call for them after dinner, when the port is sinking low in the decanter, and the logs glowing red in the fire.

A second and similar collection was foretold in A Thing of Shreds and Patches. It even has a provisional title – Ballads, Songs and Snatches – that should surprise no-one familiar with the work of W.S. Gilbert. It may yet appear. But a bolder project has pushed it aside. For it emerged in planning a second volume that three masterpieces were nearer to Bertie’s heart. This is Victorian Plums. It has only taken eight years to get round to it. But we are both very easily distracted.

Who is Bertie? He deserves a Wikipedia entry really. (I know, I could do something about that. But meanwhile…) He was born in 1927, the son of the first Lord Denham. He succeeded as the second Baron (and 10th Baronet) in 1948, and began his political life in 1961 as Government Junior Whip in the House of Lords. He was Government Chief Whip from 1979 to 1991, serving throughout Margaret Thatcher’s time in office, and into John Major’s. He remains a member of the House of Lords as an elected hereditary peer, and has been an Extra Lord in Waiting to HM The Queen since 1998.

Outside Parliament his main interests are hunting and salmon fishing. He has written four thrillers about the sleuthing exploits of the fictional Derek (Viscount) Thyrde: The Man Who Lost His Shadow (1979), Two Thyrdes (1983), Foxhunt (1988), and Black Rod (1997).