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.