Is it time to clean up my act?

I was having a drink in the Bishops’ Bar in the House of Lords last month when I was introduced to a 92-year-old peer called Lord McColl of Dulwich. I asked him if he’d known my father, Michael, who was made a life peer in 1978. Had they overlapped? He told me he hadn’t merely known him; he’d operated on him.

I realised with a start that the man I was talking to was the famous surgeon Ian McColl, who...