Next week an unmanned drone will descend on Parliament, taking shots at the Palace of Westminster. Meanwhile, a tooled-up specialist unit will scale the outside of the building. Not to panic, though — it’s not a coup or a new Bond film in progress — the “Octocopter” has been deployed to film aerial sequences for Michael Cockerell’s forthcoming documentary about the Houses of Parliament, while the abseiling is being done by technicians inspecting and cleaning Big Ben for the first time in seven years.
Capitalising on the MPs’ recess, it seems a full-scale spruce is underway — “you can’t turn a corner without being shooed away with a mop”, says one politician who has yet to go on his summer holiday. “The whole place smells of bleach”.
Cockerell, whose documentary promises to shine a light on the murky inner working of government, has been given no-holds-barred access to the Houses of Parliament for the first time in 30 years. Expect to find a few drones in Parliament as well.
