It is not often that a Chamber sitting is stripped so thoroughly of its accessory business. Monday's vote on the Fuel Stabilisation Reserve, when it was first put on the order paper a fortnight ago, was to have been the minor movement in a fuller programme — the tariff file, the Subcommittee's convening, the quieter instruments by which the Commerce Hall tends to its corridor. One by one, these have been lifted off the day and set on the day after.

This is not, I think, an accident of scheduling. Don Cordoba has chaired the Chamber long enough to know that a vote conducted in the company of four other arguments is a vote that will be argued about afterwards on grounds of its company. He has cleared the company. What remains on Monday is the reserve, and nothing else.

One reads into this what one's politics incline one to read. The Opposition has already read incompetence into the Government's handling of the ferry, the corridor, the registry, and would doubtless find a reading for the reserve if the vote goes the wrong way. The Primate, whose letter this week was the most carefully written document I have read in some months, has declined to read anything at all; he has asked for a Subcommittee to sit, and he has not repeated the request.

There is a discipline in not repeating a request. It is not the discipline Don Rafael invoked from the steps yesterday, nor the one Renko called for in return. It is the older kind, the kind the Chamber was built around before any of us were young. Whether it survives Monday, on the evidence of a single vote taken alone, will tell us rather more about the hour than the two gentlemen on the steps managed between them.