By the time they stop being mad, politicians are the right age for the House

This is a column about the reform of the House of Lords. I have a hunch it might not look like one, probably until pretty much the end, but that is what it is. Try to remember this if, at times, it appears to be about something else.

‘They should just clone ministers,’ says the Hugh Abbott character in The Thick Of It (2005), ‘so we’re born at 55 with no past and no flats and no genitals.’

How dated that seems, already. Flats, pasts and genitals remain problematic, true enough, but 55 has become unacceptably ancient. What is a suitable age, these days, for a senior MP? Fortyish? David Miliband, at 42, seems to be about optimum. Sir Menzies Campbell, all the way up at a lofty 66, never had a hope. You could see it in the chamber. He was the Grandpa Simpson of the House of Commons. When he spoke, MPs looked, then looked away, then spoke more loudly of whatever they were speaking of before.