From resignation honours to a reformed House of Lords
The way peers are appointed to the Lords has come into focus because of the recent rumours surrounding Boris Johnson’s upcoming resignation honours list. The issue is illustrative of a wider dysfunction in the UK’s second chamber and demonstrates the need for urgent reform.
The House of Lords currently has 773 sitting members, which makes the UK the only country in the world which has an Upper House with more members than its lower chamber. The Lords is the second largest legislative chamber in the world, beaten only by the Chinese National Congress. It’s overwhelmingly male, stale and pale, and acts as a political morgue with limited power or authority. Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson have all used the chamber as a depository, not just for cronies, but also the body bags generated from the stunts and shunts in Westminster politics.
Johnson’s resignation honours were always going to be controversial. In July 2020 he managed to give peerages to his brother, the former minister Jo Johnson, and ex-England cricketing icon Ian Botham, who was not recognised for his achievements on the pitch but for his enthusiastic Brexit campaigning. Most contentious was the appointment of Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Evening Standard and son of Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB agent and Russian oligarch.
Some of the controversy around Johnson’s resignation honours has centred on Nadine Dorries, the former Culture Secretary and ultra-Boris loyalist. This is in part because Ms Dorries makes good copy, but more importantly, it’s reported that there’s a plan for her, and three other MPs, to have their peerages put on ice until the next general election. This will prevent any embarrassing by-election defeats for the Tories. The Lib Dems have already been campaigning in Ms Dorries’ constituency of Mid Bedfordshire, having scented blood in the same way they did in the 2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election. Peerage postponements of this kind have never been tried before and will be a small, but not insignificant, constitutional test in the early days of King Charles’s reign.
The Johnson resignation honours list is said to include other eyebrow-raising appointments. Two loyal Downing Street advisers — Ross Kempsell, 30, and Charlotte Owen, believed to be in her late 20s — are set to be among the youngest ever life peers. There’s also a controversy centred on Paul Dacre, the Editor-in-Chief of DMG Media, publisher of the Daily Mail. He has previously been nominated for a peerage, but was rejected by the House of Lords appointments commission. If he’s back on the list, this could pose a dilemma for Rishi Sunak.
Previous attempts to reform The House of Lords have been completely botched or ended in failure. Tony Blair swung the axe over hereditary peers, which made up the majority of the house until his reforms of 1999. Blair’s reforms made the House in some ways worse by replacing all but a few hereditary aristocrats (most of whom never attended) with political cronies.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s coalition government tried to reform the House in 2012. The plan was that after a transitional period of just over a decade, there would be 360 elected members, 90 appointed members, up to 12 bishops, and up to eight additional members appointed to serve as Ministers. The elected members would have sat for fifteen years representing regions similar to those used to elect MEPs.
The House of Lords Bill was abandoned due to Tory back bench opposition. Cameron’s memoirs remembered the House of Commons debate on the bill with the following entry: “Backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg stood up with a spurious point of order. Though he was from the new intake and still in his early forties, Jacob was a caricature of an old-fashioned Tory: double-breasted suit, cut-glass accent and socially conservative views. He was also a prolific Parliamentary rebel.” The Bill was shot down by backbenchers like Rees-Mogg, worried about the amount of power Lib Dems had over government policy.
Times have changed. During the Brexit crisis of 2019 the Tory party was pitted against the House of Lords, whose members were threatening to veto Boris Johnson’s Brexit Bill. The same Jacob Rees-Mogg spoke during that year’s Conservative Party Conference: “The House of Lords, entirely unaccountable to anybody, has set its face against the British people.” He went on to say: “You see that reform becomes necessary for their Lordships’ House. It cannot carry on setting its face against the British people.”
We are now in a position where everyone from Jacob Rees-Mogg through to Jeremy Corbyn wants House of Lords reform. As a blueprint, the 2012 Bill is a good start, but it could be pushed further in two ways.
First, the Upper House should be a second chamber for all the nations and regional assemblies and Parliaments. This would keep some of the more ridiculous, attention seeking laws generated by nationalists in Westminster, Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont under control. It would also help when there are crises in Lower Houses, such as that experienced in Stormont at the moment. More controversially, an Upper House with more gravitas could set the foundations for a more federal approach to UK government, with regional Lower Houses having their homework marked in the Lords. This option is needed if a wider constitutional settlement is to be gained for the post-Brexit UK and regional nationalist foxes are to be shot.
Second, the Reformed Upper House should be located outside London, either in a historic setting such as York or Durham, or a modern city such as Glasgow. This would be a physical embodiment of government becoming less Westminster-focused and democratic levelling up.
There is little question that the House of Lords needs reform. All the main parties are committed, in their manifestos, to modernise the Lords. There is a genuine will from the electorate and politicians who are ripe for change. If Rishi Sunak puts forward Lords reform he would make the Union stronger, demonstrate he is more than a simple bean-counting technocrat and has the vision to push the UK forward. And if he doesn’t do it, Sir Keir Starmer certainly should.
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