Eighteen summers ago, in the early weeks of the newly elected Labour government, I had lunch with Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. Powell arrived late at the restaurant, apologising that he had just been finalising the largest new list of appointments to the House of Lords of modern times, 57 in all and mainly Labour, which was published a few days later.
I asked him if any of those whom he had approached had refused a peerage, or had asked for time to reflect on the offer. Powell laughed out loud at the naivete of my questions. Not even one of them, he replied. It would not be an exaggeration, he added, to say that practically all of them bit his hand off in their hurry to say yes.
It would be astonishing if Powell’s latter-day successor Ed Llewellyn has a different tale to tell about the beneficiaries who were on David Cameron’s latest list of 45 new peers published yesterday. Most new peers, now as in 1997, take little persuading. They have a variety of reasons. They want the peerage very much, think at some level that they deserve it, or easily persuade themselves they will have a role to play in the upper house – which may be so, even if, like the newly appointed Peter Hain, they were once vociferous critics.
True, the automaticity which once ensured that former cabinet ministers who no longer have seats in the Commons green benches would seamlessly resurface on the red benches in the Lords, has begun to erode a little these days. No prime minister since Margaret Thatcher has bothered to go to the Lords. Some ex-cabinet ministers of the John Major era, such as Jeremy Hanley and Lord Gowrie, or from the Tony Blair era, such as Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn, do not sit in the Lords either. And two Liberal Democrat nominees, Danny Alexander and Vince Cable, seem to have said no this time around (both have now been knighted).
It is also true that the scrutiny of prospective political peers has been tightened up a bit since 1997. That may explain why some former cabinet ministers whose careers have endured legal embarrassments of one kind or another – Jonathan Aitken, Ron Davies and Chris Huhne among them – have not become lords. This time around, seven nominees were apparently rejected on grounds of propriety, although only one name, David Laws, has been leaked. All these rejected names should be made public, along with the reasons.
The fundamental truth about the House of Lords today, however, is that things have got much worse, not stayed the same. The abolition of the rights of all but 92 of the hereditaries by the Blair government in 1999 may have mitigated one of the most obviously indefensible aspects of the UK’s second chamber. But it has had the perverse effect of accentuating the importance of another one, the patronage powers of the prime minister. The Lords has swollen by around 200 peers since the 1999 act, the vast majority of whom have been political nominees, as yesterday’s all were.
The main reason for this is the belief of all governments nowadays that the Lords should not be permitted to cause them legislative problems. Governments therefore argue that the composition of the Lords should more closely reflect the composition of the Commons. Labour embraced a proportionate share-of-votes-cast version of this doctrine in its 1997 manifesto alongside the intention to do away altogether with voting rights for hereditaries. Having not had a problem winning votes in the Lords under the coalition, Cameron has now espoused a share of seats-based version of the same general claim. His justification for yesterday’s 26 new Tory peers is that they will help him to redress the balance.
The argument is nonsense. If the object of yesterday’s exercise was to more closely reflect the share of seats in the Commons, Cameron would have to appoint hundreds of new peers (and to purge the 179 cross-benchers) not the mere 45 he sanctioned. Nor would there be 11 new Lib Dem peers, which is three more than the party’s number of MPs (there are already 101 Lib Dem lords anyway). There would also be a slew of Scottish National party peers to reflect SNP strength in the Commons – but the SNP refuses to sit in the Lords.
The net result of all these efforts is not better balance. Nor, sadly, does it ensure greater wisdom among our legislators, although any chamber that includes Alistair Darling, Menzies Campbell and David Willetts – all ennobled yesterday – is the better for their presence. In practice, the effect is simply to swell the number of eligible peers, with an associated extra cost to the taxpayer. Yesterday’s appointments took the total of peers to 826, and, with MPs, the total of Westminster legislators to 1,476. These are figures so utterly preposterous that merely to state them is to make an irresistible case for radical change in the size and purpose of the second chamber.
To an outsider, it would seem obvious that all this absurdity should push reform or abolition of the Lords up the political agenda. To insiders, however, the bloated Lords, though occasionally embarrassing, is a career necessity. In the era of the professional political class, a peerage is a gold-plated pension for increasing numbers of former MPs and, as the new list confirms, for senior special advisers too. The idea that men and women who helped steer the Labour party to two calamitous election defeats in 2010 and 2015 or who guided the Lib Dems on to the rocks in May should also be rewarded for their failure in this way would seem scandalous in any other profession. But not in politics.
In the end, and if Britain survives as a union, the UK second chamber should be fairly elected, based partly on federal principles, smaller, with no membership for life, perhaps with a minimum age of 50 and a maximum of 80, and housed in the north of England. Some way of connecting parliament to the civic wisdom, expertise, independence and experience on which the existing Lords prides itself should also be found. A Scottish National party that chose to embrace a strategy of nationalism within the union might be a very effective catalyst for such a rational outcome. One day, the House of Lords as presently constituted will have to be done away with. But I can still hear Jonathan Powell laughing.