ORDER! Order? Well, yes, everything does seem pretty much in order for Richard Younger-Ross, the man who has found the Commons touch.
Prowling Westminster's fabled corridors of power the Teignbridge Liberal Democrat MP looks very much at home.
But this very political animal refuses to live in a gilded cage, and, far from keeping people away, actually wants more to come and join him on those famous green leather benches.
'It's important for everyone in Teignbridge to know that anyone can be a councillor, anyone can be an MP,' he says.
'They ought to strive. The more people there are striving to do it, the better quality of MPs we'll have.'
He explains that he was excited by politics from a young age. 'But I went to a secondary modern and people who went to a secondary modern didn't go to Parliament..
'I started in the C stream, and got to the B stream. I'm a late developer.'
He is talking during his first break of an already hectic day in his office hidden away in the old MI5 building on the Embankment. From his lace-curtained window there is a distracting view of the stunning London Eye.
To cast my eyes over the still fairly new MP for Teignbridge in his capital working environment I have arranged to spend a day with him, acting as a shadow to the Liberal Democrat's Shadow Minister for Early Learning.
As the day progresses I will find this involves flitting through the bowels of the Palace of Westminster, guided by the helpful directions of what seems like most of the 6,000 people who work there – and a magic open-all doors pass.
By the time I arrive – my early train having disgorged its fair share of laptop-operating yuppies into London's sticky embrace – Richard is involved in a hastily arranged press conference with his leader Charles Kennedy.
I am met at the public side of a stringent security check at the magnificent Portcullis House by Richard's PR Girl Friday and right hand woman Serena Tierney.
She is a corporate lawyer on gardening leave (some gardener!) and like Siobhan Vitelli, Richard's diligent researcher, wants to be an MP herself.
She takes me past Gladstone's statue in Parliament's Central Lobby, through Westminster Hall where Charles I lost his head and the Queen Mother so recently had her lying in state.
It's a trip through modern security devices with history baying at our heels until a lift urges us skywards and the MP' office comes into view.
There's a map of Teignbridge on the wall– which is oddly reassuring – together with a list of members of the Government (in case anyone forgets?), there are cupboards, files, copies of Hansard, and a television screen telling you who is speaking and in what debate. The names on the desks are deliberately mis-spelled, whether as an in-house joke or a pre-emptive strike against media errors I never quite established.
Serena describes the office as 'not palatial for an MP, and two staff,' but it seems fine to me. It's easier to sympathise with her when she says that the thing that drives them mad about the House computer system is that it fails to print at least every second day!
Richard, who I last saw at the rain-lashed morning of Ipplepen's jubilee celebrations, soon appears and there is an air of quiet authority about him. He begins to issue instructions to his team – 'Can you print out number 12 for me?' he asks Serena in a baffling Parliament-speak that takes time to understand.
He sits behind a small mountain of post that looks as if it's been there for weeks – but it's just an average day's delivery. There are people lobbying him, companies urging their point of view, requests, invitations, a huge avalanche of demands on his time so that his diary has to be worked out six months in advance – right down to the dishwasher service!
Everything needs a considered reply – and gets it, even if it takes a while. 'We're not happy with our response times, but we're getting there,' he says.
He likes to say 'yes' to invitations but it is usually 'yes, but...'. If there is a three-line whip he can't be in two places at once.
Some problems can arise from people writing to him at different places; his home, the constituency office (which will become more important from September as the team's emphasis switches towards Devon) or Westminster.
'A lot of time is spent putting stuff in envelopes and sending it from one place to another,' he smiles ruefully.
There are important local issues to keep in mind, such as the pelican crossing at Newton Abbot's Wolborough Terrace (amen to that) and the shellfish extraction from the Teign.
He likes to keep in contact with people at the sharp end of services, such as doctors, nurses, farmers and the police, so he can better understand their problems.
Then of course there are his duties in the House (not the house his wife would prefer, he accepts with a grin).
On top of all that he has to remember to be 'a friendly and cuddly person,' to the media.
Demanding? Naturally. But he says he gets 'tremendous job satisfaction,' and immediately contradicts himself by saying it's a lifestyle not a job.
He is quick to defend the £55,000 he is paid for that lifestyle, explaining that he can work 100 hours a week on a fairly regular basis – which works out at £10 an hour.
He is paying a bricklayer £9 an hour at the moment – so says he is just about in profit!
Richard defends MP's often-criticised travel arrangements too. 'My view is that some travel is essential. As with any system there will be people who abuse it. But people abuse all aspects of the House. You don't stop what is being done because of it.'
In a timely reminder to the electorate he says: 'If people don't think their MP is doing a good job they have the wherewithal to get rid of them.'
He has done two short trips abroad including one to Belgium where he looked at the cheap tobacco shops and saw Britons piling cigarettes into black plastic sacks, 'quite clearly' to be brought back and sold on the black market. Having left at 6am he was back in Britain by 3pm – hardly a trip to worry the taxpayer.
Where Richard becomes especially interesting is on the speed of change, and how the public's thirst for instant knowledge means that nobody now wants to listen to long Commons speeches. In one swift move he ties it all in with the great asylum debate.
'The country is moving faster all the time. We get complaints that the country is changing, we must stop these people coming in, but it's not that which is changing, it's a technological revolution, Americanisation in many respects, and a sexual revolution that happened in the 60s, so that people under 40 find life very different to those over 40.
'A lot of people find themselves living in a very alien world to the one they were brought up in.'
There is scarcely time for serious consideration of foreign policy matters but as we verbally skate over the troubled Middle East, one quote of Richard's stands out. 'It was Gandhi who said: "an eye for an eye and the world ends up blind." It's absolutely true.'
A fit man, Richard is hoping to get back into training soon so he can take part in this year's great river race, the water-born equivalent of the London marathon, from Richmond to Poplar – somewhere he feels especially at home as his father was a fireman in the East End during the war.
Talking makes us hungry and at lunch, beneath the ornamental fig trees inside (yes, inside) Portcullis House there's a forceful reminder of where exactly you are. Power is in the air, you can almost smell it.
Tony Benn walks past, deep in conversation with a friend. Frank Dobson has a table nearby, Kate Hoey strides through, clipboard in hand, reminding me of a manic gym mistress.
Another reminder comes when I hesitate about leaving my jacket on the back of the chair while we fetch our meal. Serena gently points out that everyone in the building has the highest possible security clearance. 'You can look over your shoulder with concern if you want to,' she smiles. I decide not to bother.
After lunch, Serena (and her magic pass) guides me through a maze of corridors to the press gallery. In a corridor, protected by two burly minders, a man hurries past, his frown all too familiar. Clearly John Prescott is not happy about something.
The chamber itself is brighter, smaller, more adversarial than television would have you believe. Questions to the Secretary of State for Wales act as a warm up for the main event – and the chamber slowly fills, the atmosphere building, the cast of characters so well known, yet, in the flesh, startlingly fresh.
The jousting between Ian Duncan Smith and Tony Blair at Prime Minister's Question Time is good knockabout stuff, but here are two different core beliefs ranged against one another.
They cross swords about crime (is it up or down?) the stock market (overall up or down?) then IDS warns that Blair will have to work for four more years than he thought to earn his pension.
It's a gift to the Labour benches who unite to chant 'Four more years,' in delighted unison. (Richard has told me you can do all kinds of things in the chamber but you mustn't applaud).
The World Cup is mentioned – Tony Banks wants a public holiday if we reach the final. But Blair says (wise man!) let's beat Brazil first. There's support for British beef, special constables, school caretakers and even a brief mention of Gulf War Syndrome before, as the questions finish, the chamber empties as rapidly as it filled.
I have arranged to meet Richard and Serena back at the Central Lobby, and it only seems a small eternity before I find it (didn't I pass that souvenir shop before?)
There's no rest though – Richard is due at a reception held by the Society of British Aerospace Companies which estimates that more than 40,000 jobs have been lost in the UK since September 11th – and 300 of them are at Centrax in Newton Abbot.
This is where the boot is on the other foot, where Richard turns lobbyist on behalf of his constituents, where he can keep Centrax – and Teignbridge – very much in the public eye.
It's a chance to press the flesh, to meet the people who matter when it comes to jobs – as well as grabbing a much needed cup of tea – while correcting the erroneous impression so many people seem to have that Bristol is somehow buried deep in the South West.
Focusing very much on the Farnborough Air Show, the reception is opened by Trade Minister Baroness Symons whose speech is abruptly curtailed when she is called to a Division. Richard will be at Farnborough. It may help. At the reception, impressions are gained, cards exchanged, grievances aired – and the food is sumptuous.
Richard, normally mild mannered, shows his irritation in an aside as he furiously berates the Government for claiming that the unemployment figures aren't up. This is only so because highly qualified people are working in care homes to make ends meet, he mutters darkly.
It's time to move on.
There is a group of people up from the constituency for the day – just like me – who have come to join the mass lobby of Parliament on behalf of trade justice.
While the queue in which they have been patiently waiting is not quite of Queen Mother lying-in-state proportions, Serena points out from the terrace that it will still take those at its end three-and-a-half hours to reach their destination.
The Teignbridge 17 are among an estimated 13,000 who have come to plead for fairness for the world's poor, faced by the corporate might and apparent indifference of the multinationals.
Democracy is at stake, Richard is told, the power of governments is being challenged. Here, at the mother of Parliaments, the issue could hardly be bigger
Richard has a private room booked for the group and after tentative discussion there is a hushed silence as Aminata Barry, president of Mali's Jubilee 2000 – linked with Newton Abbot's Churches Together – speaks, through an interpreter, of her country's problems. Hearing that a staggering 70 per cent of its population is living in poverty it was hard not to think of that sumptuous food again
It's a time for everyone to listen and learn, to exchange views, for Richard to bring in Serena, who sits on the party's policy forming committee, and for him to be challenged by one of the prettiest of the delegates: 'what can you do about this, as a man?' ('They are almost as much use as a woman,' Serena quickly observes)
You get the sense of things happening, not quickly, but gradually, a little like turning an oil tanker, with tiny pieces coming together from all directions. So the world turns.
The meeting breaks up and there is applause for Richard. Outside one delegate, heading for the coach, says: 'at least he listened.'
Indeed he did. Richard is – among his other attributes – a good listener. It ought to come with the job (sorry, lifestyle) but doesn't always.
He has taken a while to get to Parliament, but now he is there he looks as if he belongs.
As I leave to catch my train he turns back into the maze of corridors, a man quite sure of where he is going, completely in his element.