The post is a high-profile and challenging one suitable for someone at a senior level in the public or private sectors with proven leadership and administrative skills. The ability to work in a complex political environment, and experience in the area of security, are essential.

So says the job ad in theguardian seeking a replacement for Sir Michael Willcocks, who retires next April. The job will be a scaled-down version of the current role, according to the Telegraph, retaining ceremonial duties – and, judging by the job ad, security responsibilities – but passing the running of the Lords to a new director general.

Still, a senior civil service salary and the chance to dress up in tights and wave a big staff around aren’t to be sniffed at.

Frustrated with the lack of progress from gentle dialogue with the parliamentary authorities, those marvellous chaps at mySociety have launched their Free Our Bills campaign, which I’ve just signed up to support.

They want to see Parliament publishing bills in an improved electronic form that will allow more automated processing by services like TheyWorkForYou (which helps power the LibDems’ new Iraq site, Hold Them to Account), making the issues being debated by MPs and peers more accessible to normal people like you and me.

mySociety estimate the programming work required would cost around £10,000, so it only needs one MP to sacrifice a new kitchen to pay for it.

You can register your support for the campaign on the Free Our Bills website.

Here’s an idea for making the goings-on in Parliament more accessible: podcast them.

Questions to ministers would be a good session to use it for. Set up an automated system to record the half-hour/hour long sessions of question times for the various different departments, encode them into MP3 files and make them available online. Set them up with categorised feeds so that listeners could subscribe to all of them or just the departments they’re interested in. This doesn’t just apply to the UK Parliament, of course: it would also be a useful service for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London Assembly.

Turns out that the ever-innovative theguardianunlimited have this set up already for PMQs – search the iTunes podcast directory for “pmqs”. I guess they make it available manually, but I’d be interested to know otherwise.