In the final hours of the Liz Truss regime, a key question was obsessing advisers: who would get a seat in the House of Lords? Her inner circle was divided as to whether, after just 49 days in office, such privileges were even appropriate. As a few aides tried to convince Truss that honours would be a mistake, her chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, was adamant a select few would become the lords and ladies of tomorrow.
A prime minister determined to appoint a peer will almost always get his man
As a former prime minister, Truss has the right to put forward a list of ‘resignation honours’. The jury is still out as to whether she will choose to do so. There have been five PMs in six years, each entitled to their own set of resignation honours and with their own staff, courtiers, ministers and donors to placate. The posts of Downing Street chief of staff and director of communications have been held by 12 people in two years. More than 60 per cent of Conservative MPs have now served as a minister or a whip. Peerages are a useful way of buying favours, appeasing factions and smoothing the regular transitions of power in Westminster. But in an age of political transience, the permanence of these appointments is especially jarring.
In his three-year tenure, Boris Johnson created 87 peers, twice as many as his predecessor Theresa May. He has refused to follow convention even in his departing act. Ross Kempsell, 30, and Charlotte Owen, 29, both tipped for appointment by Johnson, would be the youngest life peers in history. Kempsell is a journalist turned spin doctor turned journalist turned spin doctor. His best-known scoop was revealing that Johnson enjoyed painting hand-crafted model buses during the 2019 leadership race; the pair subsequently became tennis partners. Owen’s credentials are four years as a parliamentary aide and 21 months in No. 10, where, one former colleague says, she ‘spent a lot of her time writing letters to MPs from the Prime Minister’.
Johnson’s plans for MPs such as Nigel Adams and Nadine Dorries to ‘defer’ their peerages until the next election to avoid by-election defeats have attracted scorn from constitutional experts. Evgeny Lebedev, who as owner of the Evening Standard made sure his paper backed Johnson, only recently bothered to pick up his letters patent, the document conferring his peerage.
While outwardly polite, many members of the Lords are privately concerned about another deluge of appointments. ‘How much life experience do these life peers have?’ asks one older member. Others question the methods of appointment. ‘I know no one in the House of Lords on any benches who believes that Liz Truss should merit an honours list or that the concept of deferred peerages should become accepted convention,’ says Lord Cormack, who serves on the executive of the Association of Conservative Peers. He has suggested a ‘two out, one in’ system to reduce the size of the ever-expanding 800-strong chamber.
Such issues pre-date Johnson, of course. Michelle Mone, one of David Cameron’s 245 ennoblements, this week took a leave of absence in the Lords amid questions about her role in securing lucrative PPE contracts.
It’s no surprise therefore that there are demands to curb the prime minister’s unlimited power to appoint new members. Like much of Britain’s constitution, this power rests on what Peter Hennessy calls the ‘good chap’ theory of government: the belief that politicians will act in the best interests of the nation and its institutions. That means placing the interests of the House of Lords above one’s own. A prime minister can choose when to appoint, how many to appoint and what the party balance is among new members. The King makes formal appointments, but convention requires him to act on his first minister’s advice. ‘It is remarkable,’ writes Dr Meg Russell of UCL’s Constitution Unit, ‘that there are still no enforceable constraints’ on this prerogative.
As the case of Lord Lebedev has proven, a prime minister determined to appoint a peer will almost always get his man. The House of Lords Appointments Commission carries out proprietary checks, but has limited powers. Instead, public opinion serves as the main constraint on excess, a constraint that is somewhat redundant once the nominator has left office. A new premier can block their predecessor’s nominations, but this would create a damaging precedent: it risks retaliation every time power changes hands and would remove the incentive to bestow peerages on vanquished foes.
The existing system certainly seems to have lost both elite and public support. A Constitution Unit survey in October found that just 6 per cent of those surveyed supported the current system: 58 per cent would prefer an independent body to appoint new members. Yet creating an independent regulator is not without its difficulties. There is the question of democratic legitimacy to consider: a prime minister has at least some kind of mandate from the country. The current chair of the Lords Appointments Commission, Paul Bew, is a well-respected but relatively unknown academic, even within Westminster. Should he have the sole right to decide who gets to sit in the Lords?
Keir Starmer is keen to push the abolition of the Lords, but even he seems to shy away when it comes to specifics. He seems enthusiastic in principle on Gordon Brown’s plans for the Lords to be replaced by an ‘assembly of the nations and regions’. It’s good politics, painting Labour as the party of change and exciting its base. Yet there are clear tensions with older grandees: Peter Mandelson has disparaged those who ‘showboat and grandstand about abolition’, while David Blunkett warned of ‘gridlock’ and the need for policy ‘prioritisation’. Starmer’s own nominations to the Lords are not without controversy: new appointee Tom Watson can expect a mixed reception among Tory peers who remember his involvement in the confected Westminster paedophile controversy.
A permanent Lords settlement eluded both Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. None of Labour’s six prime ministers ever abandoned their prerogative to appoint peers. Starmer might find there’s a reason for that, whatever the faults within the current system.
This article originally said Lord Lebedev ‘has not yet bothered to pick up his letters patent, the first step in becoming a working member of the House’. We are pleased to confirm that he has now collected them.
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