TEN Downing Street should also be moved to Stoke if the House of Lords has to relocate, rattled peers have demanded.
Angry Lords yesterday blasted government proposals to move them to the North while the crumbling Palace of Westminster is fixed.
And they told “meddling” ministers that they would only go if MPs and the rest of Whitehall also upped sticks with them.
The backlash came after Michael Gove suggested they would receive a “warm welcome” in somewhere like Stoke.
But in a marathon debate incandescent peers likened the Cabinet Minister to an estate agent trying to pack them off to “geographical obscurity”.
Lord Norton insisted: “If one Chamber moves, the other must as well, and so must the Executive. If Westminster decants, then so too must Whitehall.”
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Ex-Cabinet Minister Lord Blunkett raged that separating the two Houses would mean “Black Rod leaping on to a train which gets held up at Milton Keynes and taking a bus through to Stoke-on-Trent to knock on a door that has already been opened, the Queen having been held up somewhere on the M6 – that is the kind of nonsense we are talking about.”
Tory Lord Cormak hit out at the plans to have them “hived off…into geographical obscurity because the Government wanted that to happen as part of their levelling-up agenda.”
Asked if Boris Johnson would be happy to move to Stoke, the PM’s spokesman said arrangements while the Palace is restored is a matter for Parliament.
