MPs aren’t the elite – faceless bureaucrats are

I see that the most boring conversation in the nation is back. The one even worse than people in the country telling you that the only real difficulty in getting to their part of Gloucestershire/Norfolk/the Orkneys is the drive out of London. I refer to, of course, the reform of the House of Lords.

The debate is perennial because there is no good answer to it. The ‘cash for peerages’ scandal comes around every few years because it is unsolvable. If you don’t offer inducements for political donations then what sane person would give millions of pounds to a political party? Besides which, all the constitutional alternatives are worse. The only sensible argument I ever heard of for reform of the Upper House was the one Roger Scruton came up with while defending the presence of the hereditary peers. Roger’s rather ingenious argument was that the hereditaries were in some ways the most representative parliamentarians of the lot.