TENSIONS are running high among politicians in Westminster as the Brexit negotiations begin, though that’s nothing compared with the ‘Cathedral of Horror’ simmering beneath them.

Managing a “higgledy-piggledy” collection of pipes, cables and wiring lurking under the Parliament buildings was all in a day’s work for Westminster’s most senior official, former Clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Robert James Rogers.

With a budget of £250 million a year as Corporate Officer and responsibility for a prime acreage in London SW1, including Big Ben, it was no wonder that home in Herefordshire provided balm for his fevered brow.

Speaking to an audience in St Thomas a Becket Church at Huntington, part of a season of fundraising events organised by the Friends, Lord Lisvane, now a cross-bench peer in the Lords, gave a flavour of his responsibilities.

“For those of you who have been corporate officers, you will know the waking up in a cold sweat at three-in-the-morning moments,” he said. “If anything goes wrong, you are the one who is sued; and if anything goes seriously wrong, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act means that you quite literally end up in the dock.”

Herefordshire, and more particularly the Golden Valley, has been his home for over 40 years. When he first took his seat in the House of Lords, the county’s own political sketch writer, Quentin Letts was there.

The “whiskered Sir Robert - church organist and beady-eyed scholar” was supported by former Speaker, Lady Boothroyd, and received an “unusually big cheer” from peers and spectators.

Back on home soil, Lord Lisvane’s wife, Jane, the Rev Lady Lisvane, who was ordained in 2013 and works as an assistant priest in the Borderline benefice from Cusop to Preston-on-Wye, has been appointed as the county’s new High Sheriff.

Her particular focus will be on organisations supporting those who find themselves lonely and cut off in an area with an ageing population and limited rural public transport.

Her husband has notched up 45 years in Parliament, and if he looks familiar that’s because he appeared in a BBC documentary which went behind the scenes to look at life inside the Commons. After stepping down as 49th Clerk - an office dating back to 1363 - he was granted the rare honour of being named for a life peerage by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron personally. In 2014, The Spectator named him as Parliamentarian of the Year.

He has written two books about Parliament and, after his talk at Huntington, quickly sold out of signed copies of Order! Order! and Who Goes Home? He's also joint author of How Parliament Works, now in its seventh edition.

Away from Westminster, he is an Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford and an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple Inn of Court, and a Liveryman of the Skinners’ Company. Closer to home, he has been chairman of Hereford Cathedral Perpetual Trust and governor of an inner-city school. He even manages to fit in time for sailing, shooting, playing the organ and planting trees.

At Huntington, it was with easy assurance that Lord Lisvane rattled through the history and architecture of the Palace of Westminster, a “wonderful Gothic wedding cake” on the Thames. Nor did he hold back in stating his case for its urgent restoration and renewal. “One of the biggest challenges to Parliament today is not political but physical,” he said. Nothing serious has been done since the Palace was built in the 1840s and 1850s and politicians have long been trying to put off the “inevitable”, he said.

“If you visit the grand rooms on the Principal Floor everything looks fine, but if you go down to what I christened the Cathedral of Horror you will find electricity, water, superheated steam (not a good neighbour for high-tension electricity), air-conditioning, comms, IT, sewage all higgledy-piggledy.” Lord Lisvane was determined that his would not be “yet another generation of stewards who passed on their responsibilities”.

He outlined the options: “super-aggressive maintenance” - which would mean operating from a building site for 30 years - or decanting one House first, then the other. He preferred the recommendation for a “full decant” of both Houses: “The Commons probably to Richmond House, the Lords to the QE2 Conference Centre,” he believed.

Lord Lisvane accepts the whole process will be “eye-waveringly expensive”. He told how a former Prime Minister admitted to being “viscerally opposed to moving out of the building”. In rather more pragmatic tones, he replied: “I’m afraid that if the main sewer goes, we will be decanting the day after tomorrow, never mind in 2020.”

It’s not surprising how he understands the structural needs of such an iconic public building. Lord Lisvane’s great-great-grandfather’s company was responsible for building Cardiff’s imposing City Hall, where a portrait of his ancestor still hangs, as well as the city’s main civic buildings including the law courts and Royal Infirmary.

That’s why the Cardiff-born peer opted for the title of Lord Lisvane, an area of the city and where his mother was born in the imposing Ty Gwyn mansion. “It was because my great-great-grandfather Ephraim Turner founded the builders E Turner and Sons, who built the wonderful civic centre and lots and lots of buildings around Cardiff and elsewhere,” he has explained. Lord Lisvane plans to take the couple’s two daughters, Catherine and Eleanor on a journey into the family’s past in the Welsh capital.

He is justly proud of initiating the process of planning for restoration of the Palace of Westminster, though he fears politicians may be too scared to take a decision that might be criticised.

“The longer we put it off, the worse it will be. It may be, of course, that my successor will be tempted to creep down in the middle of the night and take a sledgehammer to the main sewer.....”