UNDER Caroline Lucas’s leadership, the Green Party was transformed from a tiny, single-issue organisation into a mature party with clout and it has developed radical policies on the economy, on burning social issues and the environment and constructed a fundamental critique of the capitalist system itself.

Lucas has managed to do this without resorting to extremist or wild utopian rhetoric. Her challenge to the Establishment, implicitly iconoclastic, comes across as sane, rational and humane.

Her book, as she herself emphasises, has been put together in between meetings, parliamentary committee sittings, from scribbled notes during late-night train journeys from London back to Brighton and emails and notes taken by her assistant Cath Miller.

It is no long-deliberated and honed political philosophical tract but is a record of progress to date, of challenges and setbacks as well as some successes — an “of the moment, from-the-trenches snapshot of the first five years of coalition government.”

This is not necessarily a disadvantage. Honourable Friends? reflects Lucas’s genuine passion and commitment, her honesty and vision.

Generations of Labour MPs, instead of challenging the arcane rituals of parliament derived from public school or gentleman’s club, have submitted in awe and felt honoured to be admitted to the Palace of Westminster and not dared suggest change.

Former Labour MP Margaret Beckett told Lucas when she first arrived in the House of Commons: “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.” But she hasn’t and refuses to do so. Taking inspiration from the Suffragettes, she is determined to challenge and help sweep away the dust of centuries. Rightly, she argues that Parliament should be there to serve the people and its procedures should facilitate that and be brought into the modern world. Parliament, she contends, should cease to be a comic opera.

The silk slings in the cloakrooms for hanging up swords, the snuff box at the entrance to the chamber, the physical walk through the Aye or No lobbies to register a vote and the reliance on party leader patronage to obtain a decent office are just some of the foolish anachronisms of the system.

Lucas ridicules and demolishes central platforms of the coalition one after the other. With devastating simplicity and rationality, she exposes the blatant lying of leading minsters and makes strong arguments for public ownership.

Against the unwritten rules of parliamentary procedure she used her maiden speech, which by tradition is anodyne, to attack the polluting firm Trafigura which had already sued the BBC and forced journalists to remain silent about its activities.

“I have come to see up close, how unless Parliament changes, progress in every other area of our national life faces delay or obstruction,” she writes. Lucas might be only a one-woman show, but she packs a political punch far beyond her own or her party’s weight.

A wonderfully refreshing and empowering read.