Things can often get overheated during stuffy debates in the House of Commons with ministers trading blows across the floor.

But nothing prepared the assembled members for a spectacular attack on larger-than-life Mid Sussex MP Nicholas Soames yesterday.

He was told he should be put in a gigantic tub of jelly and turned into a tourist attraction by a former minister.

Ex-Sports Minister Tony Banks suggested this fate for the colourful Tory MP during a debate on hunting.

Mr Soames, a former Armed Forces Minister, had launched an attack in the Commons on the anti-hunt lobby.

He said opinion polls had been conducted in Mid Sussex on the issue.

He added: "They have shown that a majority of the general public seem to disapprove of almost everything.

"This includes tripe and black pudding, smoking, immigration, Radio 3 and, very likely, Mr Deputy Speaker, the colour of your front door, and, indeed, of mine.

"If all those, or more, are to be made the subject of criminal offences, we shall all be in jail before too long."

He said fox-hunting involved a blatant assertion of traditional English values no longer admired as much as they used to be - manners, ceremony, boldness and display, hierarchy, and easy courtesy.

Mr Soames accused "polytechnic-bred louts" who saw a hunt of "feeling the urge to pull down the symbols of authority and spit on a piece of old England".

But Mr Banks, Labour MP for West Ham, rounded on Mr Soames. He said: "I love the honourable Member for Mid Sussex, in a very non-erotic way, but he really is an unreconstructed old snob.

"My own feeling is that he should be set in a vast tub of aspic and turned into a tourist attraction.

"I believe that people would pay good money to come and see a perfectly- preserved example of that endangered species, snobbus gargantuus."

He said all the same arguments were used in the House on April 24, 1800, when MPs had opposed a ban on bull-baiting, arguing it would cause unemployment and for other bloodsports to be outlawed.