Say what you like about Charlotte Owen, Boris Johnson’s pet baroness, but for an accepted nonentity she is doing valuable work. Valuable, that is, to hereditary peers. It is the young baroness’s achievement, with the help of some similarly resented colleagues, to make the hereditaries look – almost – legit.
Now that Labour has returned to the task, bungled by Tony Blair, of abolishing hereditary peers in the House of Lords, the endangered peers have in turn resumed their primary activity of defending the indefensible: themselves. The ritual arguments are as desperate as ever. Already, half-forgotten apparitions like the 2nd Baron Strathclyde, whose title goes back all the way to 1955, are working themselves up, demanding to know why, basically, elected politicians didn’t ask permission before tinkering with privileges 92 men are still able to acquire due to being, as David Lloyd George once put it, “first of the litter. You would not choose a spaniel on these principles”.
“Twenty-five years ago, countless debates and questions took place in the House,” Strathclyde has informed Baroness Smith, leader of the House, “and, ultimately, we finished up with a consensual way forward agreed among the parties”. Ah. Those would be the events the hereditary Lord Caithness described as “the plague of 99”.
The deal whereby Blair’s government agreed, idiotically, to spare 92 hereditaries who would be replaced as and when, via elections (usually among hereditaries), of like-for-like versions, was a time-saving political compromise that breached Labour’s manifesto pledge to abolish them all. At the time – maybe he has forgotten? – Strathclyde said, with the sort of patrician composure we can expect to enjoy again as the save-our-hereditaries campaign gains momentum: “The glass is shattered and it cannot be remade. The prime minister has taken a knife and scored a giant gash across the face of history.”
In practical terms the giant gash across the face of history meant that a substantial section of the Lords would remain solidly Tory, probably Etonian, massively privileged and entirely (since the death of one exception) male. Not that the organised sex discrimination, courtesy of male primogeniture, was an issue in 1999. To be fair to 1999, it’s not much of one now. Of the defences of hereditaries I have seen this time round, most simply ignore the difficulty, as women might think of it, of maintaining within parliament a kind of Garrick Club, albeit one where the members are paid to enjoy the facilities and there is never a need to pretend you’d welcome an application from Judi Dench. Thanks to the reliable upper house Kool-Aid, there is every chance that captivated progressives will come to find the membership arrangements, unlike the Garrick’s, quaintly charming.
We might expect the former editor of the Daily Telegraph Charles Moore (created Baron Moore of Etchingham by Johnson) to trivialise, as he has, the formal exclusion of women from 92 seats. But last week Baroness Jenny Jones, a Green party life peer, also sympathised with hereditaries in a Guardian article that did not address their most important characteristic after a qualifying bloodline. “Why pick on hereditary peers,” she asked, “while leaving the corrupt system of prime ministerial patronage?”
And this is where Lady Owen of Wherever, along with Michelle Mone, Evgeny Lebedev and a host of regrettable life peerages, come to the rescue. How could hereditaries be worse? For the historian Andrew Roberts (“Baron Roberts of Belgravia”), Labour is hypocritical to condemn hereditaries as undemocratic, while accepting that “the rest of the peers should be there by equally undemocratic ministerial appointment”.
Leaving aside Labour’s manifesto commitment to further reform, and the fact that all hereditary seats were originally appointments, it is undeniable that some appointed peers are as unappealing as any hereditary, including the one who worked for the London affiliate of Russia’s Sovcomflot shipping company. Mercifully, however, the descendants of Johnson’s abominations will not be replacing them, sometimes – as in the case of numerous hereditaries – via the most tortuous or unimpressive routes. When the House of Lords welcomed Lord Reay in 2019, the Daily Mirror noted that he owed his title, created in 1628, to his “great-grandad’s cousin’s dad’s fourth cousin’s dad’s cousin’s great-great-great-grandad”. More recently Labour’s Viscount Stansgate, a lesser known Benn, has embraced, while it remains open, a legislative route renounced by his father, Tony.
It may be progress of sorts, a sign that top feudal antecedents are not the character references they once were, that hereditary survival strategy seems increasingly focused on a technicality. It’s argued that Blair’s government pinky-promised not to trouble the hereditaries again until a thorough reform of the upper house had been agreed (ie, never). Caithness is among those insisting, as if it had been dreamed up by Mephistopheles not Lord Weatherill, that there was “a binding-in-honour agreement”. Moore says: “Sir Keir’s Bill breaks the promise made in 1999.” In normal language: Starmer is resuming House of Lords reform.
It would, of course, be fascinating if Starmer apologised for disrespecting the sacred bodge, as requested, and obediently dumped his bill. Since in doing so he would be endorsing the reversal by Caithness and his allies of a fundamental parliamentary precept: no parliament can bind its successors.
We can further expect – in fact they have already begun – pained pro-hereditary objections to “piecemeal” reform, ie, to reform in which their own, hotly anticipated departure is the next piece. They wouldn’t object if, for instance, Starmer was targeting lazy life peers, or reforming his own powers of patronage. Their all-or-nothing argument might be more compelling if Lords reform had not always been agonisingly incremental; the initial, 1911, Parliament Act said a plan for a second chamber constituted on a popular basis could not be “immediately brought into operation”. But hereditary legislators are the last men who need reminding of the past. It’s where they still think they live.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
