NECESSITY, they say, is the mother of invention.

And this week, it even extended itself to the historic gasworks by the River Thames.

Change comes at a glacial pace to Westminster and sometimes not at all. Age is revered within the Gothic Palace, no more so than in the gilded House of Lords, where time passes either slowly or very slowly.

As time has passed for me and snow has now settled on the roof, I have seen novice MPs rail and rage against the antique practices of the Gothic Parliament, only for them a few years in to become zealous defenders of its noble traditions.

Of course, it cannot be denied that some of the traditions are more noble than others. The days of MPs having to wear a top hat to make a point of order have thankfully passed.

But there is sometimes an unseen logic behind some parliamentary practices.

Calling someone honourable or right honourable might seem quaint but it is meant to keep the atmosphere in the chamber genial; it is hard, so the theory goes, to be overly disparaging to a political opponent if you have to call him or her honourable. Although, wit and irony can be the greatest of parliamentary weapons.

One of the more incomprehensible traditions that perplexes and annoys new MPs is the voting system. When legislatures around the globe use technology to cast votes in the blink of an eye, the denizens of Westminster have to traipse through wide, dusty corridors to have their names ticked off in a ledger, Hogwarts-style.

Not long ago, the youthful SNP MP Hannah Bardell fell foul of the Commons Speaker when she took to social media to post a video from within the Lobby, showing just how ridiculous it all was for honourable members to go through 15-minute vote after 15-minute vote to decide on interminable parts of the Brexit process.

While many would say the Livingston MP had an extremely good point, others would suggest there is a practical reason for what seems an inane impracticality; the delayed process gives the party whips a chance to gently, or not so gently, encourage colleagues to file into the correct lobby; pressing a button would rob them of the time to use the black art of persuasion.

Resistance to change meant that in the late 1980s there was, to say the least, a deal of opposition to the TV cameras being allowed in to broadcast democracy in action; many MPs thought voters would be more interested in hairdos and clothes than what was actually coming out of the mouths of their politicians.

But now, necessity has once again pulled up at the gates of Westminster and MPs are being asked to skip a century; from the 19th to the 21st.

The video-conferencing tool of Zoom is being used, which to many members was hitherto an ice lolly from their salad days of the 1980s.

As I write, the initial experiment has gone relatively well. There were, of course, a few glitches. David Mundell, the former Scottish Secretary, was, MPs were told, “unable to connect” during the first digital PMQs. No comment.

Learning to use the mute button seems to be one of the more important aspects. During the Lords’ virtual session Green peer Baroness Jones admitted she was slow to unmute and eventually asked if she could put her question but was graciously told she was too late.

However, the most embarrassing moment in this new age of digital parliamentary democracy came when Vaughan Gething, the Welsh Health Minister, turned the air blue with an expletive-laden tirade; to make matters worse it turned out to be against one of his own Labour colleagues Jenny Rathbone.

He later apologised to her but, somewhat disdainfully, brushed the incident aside on Twitter as an “unwelcome distraction at a time of unprecedented challenge”. The unprecedented challenge being coronavirus, of course, not new technology.

As if to demonstrate how our unhurried Parliament adheres to a process of evolution rather than revolution, MPs backed electronic voting; well, almost.

That model of modernity Jacob Rees-Mogg pointed out that a committee of MPs would first look at the procedure and assess whether it was "workable" or not. Which is a fair point; the last thing the Commons wants is for a vote to be invalidated. Although, I gently point out, they do seem to have nailed down how to do electronic voting in other parts of the UK and across the globe, where parliaments have been pressing buttons for many years.

The urbane Commons Leader reappeared this week at the dispatch box to announce even he had to agree to go with the technological flow this week albeit one could sense with a deal of pin-striped reluctance.

"In 1349,” the Old Etonian declaimed, “when the Black Death affected this country, Parliament couldn't sit and didn't; the session was cancelled.

“Thanks to modern technology, even I have moved on from 1349 and I'm glad to say that we can sit to carry out these fundamental constitutional functions. And I'm enormously grateful to many who are just as traditionalist as I am, who have accepted these constraints." Necessity indeed.