Will these reforms include earplugs?

One of the Health ministers was doing that ghastly thing that Health ministers do – talking, you know, talking all the time – and I was within an ace of disgracing myself by sending a wild cry of pain into the rafters. Oh, it was awful what she was saying, really degrading stuff. "The National Service Framework and the publication of the National Standards, the first ever National Standards which we've done in partnership with those that are going to have to make it work with primary care trusts and consultants and patients managing their own condition not only through the National Standards framework but the process of developing it will be responsible for helping and so, too, will the investment and that is investment that has always happened."

The Speaker stirred himself like a heap of overheating compost and told her to sit down.

It's the sort of rubbish that minister's questions produces. It's bad enough when the minister has a voice like sweet music (no, I can't think of an example just now) but when the minister is Hazel Blears (she has a voice like a dentist's drill) the pain is indescribable.

Robin Cook is trying to get a few modest changes to the way the House operates. It's called a modernisation programme and has been the subject of – ooh, how many? – two million man hours in various committees since 1345. He is proposing that the House sits at more conventional hours, well not that much more conventional. It's proposed they start at 11.30am and don't carry on till dawn the next day. Duelling will probably be forbidden anywhere other than the committee corridor. Private Notice Questions will be given a new name, members will be able to send in their questions by e-mail. What will this madman make them do next?

At the moment, questions for ministers have to be tabled two weeks before they are answered. About 10 years ago, a committee recommended a shorter period, perhaps in the hope of making questions more topical. Ten years ago, we were young and strong and full of promise.

The Conservatives are against change – it's because they are conservative. So Mr Cook, in a therapeutic way, recommended how they might approach the issue, pointing out that before the introduction of gas lighting, right up to the 19th century, the House had sat in the mornings. Think of it not as a modernisation programme, he urged his opposite number, but as a reversion to tradition.

Eric Forth made the point that no amount of changes to Parliament's working methods would bring voters back to the voting booths. And he may have gone on to say something even more interesting when the Sketch's deadline fell. Had the debate started three hours earlier, we could have given it the full glare of publicity in living Sketcho-colour. But maybe that's what the Tories are trying to avoid.

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