LIBERATE THE LORDS

It is probably some time since even the keenest student of politics focused on the future of the House of Lords. Most people will remember that day the hereditary peers were expelled from the red benches, amid the horrible glee of Baroness Jay and others. Some may dimly recall a row between William Hague and Lord Cranborne, and then a period when Mr Blair flooded the place with cronies. After that a fog descends. In the next couple of weeks Parliament will try to make sense of the mess. A series of options will be presented. It goes without saying that they are all bad.

The appointive system is the most obviously repulsive. It sticks in the gullet to imagine a revising chamber selected by a committee of people like Douglas Hurd, the odd bishop, a female quangocrat, a token member of an ethnic minority and a superannuated trade unionist. Around this small group the flies of ambition will buzz, and all resultant appointments will be miserable and degraded, shorn of any real authority. Almost as bad, however, is the fashionable notion that the upper chamber should be wholly elected. This now has the support of senior Tories, for the cowardly reason that any other option would make the party look out of touch. It should be obvious to most MPs that an elected upper chamber would be a very serious threat to their position. The two Houses often take different views: how could a member of the Commons reply, in a dispute, to the taunt from a member of the Upper House that he, too, had a democratic mandate? It seems crazy that the Commons should voluntarily cede yet further authority.