Robert Nugent, Lord Clare, First Lord of the Board of Trade when the Manx case was brought to London after the Revestment.

George Moore came over on behalf of the Island and found him unhelpful. Clare was suspicious of the proposals attached to the Memorial, and when Moore set out the sufferings that had followed the stopping of the trade, the flight of the young people to other lands and the deserted dwellings of the towns, Clare answered with contempt, calling the inhabitants of the former trading towns a nest of vermin collected from the dregs of the neighbouring countries.

In the Commons he was a fixture of the American debates. He held that the speech from the throne was orthodox and ought not to be questioned, and was sorry to find even a single negative voice against continuing the tax, though he was willing to see the House go into committee once he found there was dissension. He handled the Irish side of the argument in the same manner, complimenting Richard Rigby, jocularly, on the popularity and reverence in which the whole Irish nation held him. Answering a speech on the famine and the beggary of the American colonists he declined to enter the lists, saying he had in his hand a friend who was a match for the argument, his old friend Sir Joshua Gee.

He was not only a partisan. In the debates on the relief of the Dissenters he compared England with France in the matter of religious penalties left to lie dormant, and in 1773 he told the committee on the poor laws that the distresses of the poor had become so urgent as to make an attempt at a remedy absolutely necessary, having made a minute enquiry in Essex and found a labourer there with six or seven children.