DEMOCRACY is not served in a House of Commons that is rectangular.

Most democratic assemblies have dispensed with an architectural style that encourages the juvenile across-the-floor insult-slinging typifying most Westminster debate these days.

Does the geography of the Palace of Westminster reinforce and entrench a two-party system? Where, for instance, would you put a strong third party?

It’s moot to what extent a rectangular House, with its ‘opposing’ banks of benches, determines the nature of British politics.

You wouldn’t think that, in an intelligent society, our MPs would be encouraged to snap at each other by a mere architectural quirk.

They ought to be able to recognise the inadequacies of the Westminster building and rise above such trivialities.

This would be to disregard the huge influence of body language.

Our MPs, facing each other full on, cannot help but be adversarial.

The arrangement clearly turns the Mother of Parliaments into a miserable, back-biting, negative dogfight rather than a genuine debating chamber.

This is emphasised by the twin red lines on the carpet that run in front of each set of benches, over which Government and Opposition members are not allowed to stray during debate. They are, significantly, ‘two sword-lengths apart’.

Medieval health and safety at work, presumably.

The Welsh and Scottish, given their own assemblies, settled immediately and without question on circular and semi-circular designs respectively.

In Britain, only Northern Ireland retains a rectangular arrangement and this again is down to limited architectural options at Stormont, not choice.

Because we have lived with this kind of architectural apparatus for centuries and resisted time and time again suggestions to move from Westminster (Buckingham Palace, St James’s Park and a site in Charing Cross, apparently), we are stuck with it.

Yes, Buckingham Palace. I didn’t realise, but William IV really didn’t like Buck House and wanted to flog it as a new seat of government. MPs were not enamoured and turned the offer down.

There was an opportunity to rebuild in the round in 1852 when Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin were in their heyday. It was not boldly grasped. It may, indeed, have never occurred to them.

By the time of the 1950 rebuild by Giles Gilbert Scott following the destruction of the Commons by a bomb in May, 1941, there was simply no room to insert Commons and Lords rotundas or semi-rotundas.

The first Prime Minister’s question time last week reinforced the impression that a number of adolescent rich kids were having a slanging match.

Anyone who watched it dispassionately would have been convinced that no real government was taking place.

Justice has to be seen to be done. What we see in the Commons is not democracy writ large. This is not the stage where the business is done, nor is it even the shop window.

Switch the cameras and microphones off, move them to the committee rooms and whips’ offices and MPs’ bunkers where the real deals take place.

Nothing of consequence can ever come, spontaneously and genuinely democratic, from the green or red plush benches.