The House of Lords should 'avoid cliches like the plague'
The other day the Lords debated the revolutionary proposal that peers who have had enough of the place should be allowed to quit, and even discussed whether the House should have a retirement age. Let us step straight up to the plate and endorse the view of the peeress who acknowledged that while we could simply "wring our hands" about the house being too large, it was in fact high time to "bite the bullet, grasp the nettle and accept that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs". For while it is always true that people who act in haste may repent in leisure, it's perhaps even more on the nose that a stitch in time saves nine, and they who hesitate are lost. Some peers suggested that to sugar the pill a lump sum might be paid to those who had passed their sell-by dates, but this was firmly resisted by the leader of the house, Lord Strathclyde, who as a Scot is well aware that many a mickle makes a muckle (or is it the other way round?). Riding roughshod over those who thought it best to kick any such notion into the long grass, the Lords agreed, on the principle of striking while the iron is hot, to let the proposal proceed. Yet if peers who are past it need to be told to quit, shouldn't this kind of clapped-out metaphorical ironmongery be sent to the scrapheap as well? Is it really too much to hope that Messrs Cameron and Clegg might now circulate to ministers the advice that used to appear long ago in a Manchester Guardian stylebook? "Avoid cliches," it said, "like the plague."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/01/unthinkable-retiring-cliches
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