Lord Weatherill, who ushered Britain’s House of Commons into the television age and was the last speaker to wear the traditional shoulder-length wig, died Sunday. He was 86.

He presided at the House of Commons between 1983 and 1992.

“I often say I’m not in the entertainment business,” Weatherill said in 1991, not long after television cameras were introduced to Britain’s legislative body. “This is a workshop.”

He was elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative in 1964, and was elevated to the House of Lords in 1992.

The son of a Savile Row tailor, he carried a thimble in his pocket because his mother said it would keep him humble. He was the last speaker to wear the traditional shoulder-length wig — a tradition dropped by his successor, Betty Boothroyd.

Weatherill was in the speaker’s chair when Geoffrey Howe delivered the speech that precipitated Thatcher’s downfall. Howe’s November 1990 resignation from the Cabinet over Thatcher’s Euroskeptic policies — which he said had forced him into a “tragic conflict of loyalties” — sparked a challenge to Thatcher’s leadership that led her to resign.

“Here you saw effectively a bloodless coup,” Weatherill recalled. “It was a great parliamentary occasion none of us will ever, ever forget.”