Why can’t Starmer be honest about reforming the Lords?

Sometimes life comes at you fast. Barely 18 months ago, Sir Keir Starmer, beginning to scent general election victory in his future, pledged to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber as part of a project to ‘restore trust in politics’. By Tuesday this week, the Labour leader in the upper house, Baroness Smith of Basildon, could make no firmer a commitment than keeping an ‘open mind’ to the possibility of phasing out the remaining 92 hereditary peers. That seems like quite a journey.

House of Lords reform is in some ways the ultimate parlour game for constitutional obsessives. It has a familiar and well-worn charm: it is, after all, more than 100 years since H.H. Asquith’s Liberal government introduced the Parliament Act 1911, the first serious measure to curb the power of the unelected chamber. Since then, however, there have been as many false dawns as major achievements.