Peer review

When I took my seat in the Lords as a very nervous 21-year-old, Manny Shinwell, the redoubtable Labour peer, welcomed me with the words ‘I knew your grandmother Nancy. She was a rebel like me. Enjoy yourself. You won’t be here long before they chuck you out.’ Forty-two years later I am still here — perhaps past my sell-by date. The House of Lords is bursting at the seams. The numbers must come down. And yet David Cameron must appoint more peers in the forthcoming honours list.

Every Prime Minister in history, from Harold Wilson with his ‘lavender list’ to Tony Blair with his cronies, has caused controversy when creating peerages. Cameron’s new peers will probably be no different, however carefully the names are chosen then vetted by the Lords Appointments Commission.

Even so, he has a problem, which is that Lords is so stacked against the Conservatives that to achieve anything like a working majority he would have to appoint far too many peers to an already overcrowded second chamber. Peers now overflow into what were visitor seats. Question time is only for those who can bellow the loudest. The House of Lords is second in size to only the Chinese People’s Congress and is the only parliamentary second chamber in the Commonwealth that is larger than the first. It cries out to be reformed.

The Lords has made some reforms. Peers convicted of a criminal offence can be thrown out, as can those who act inappropriately in their parliamentary duties. I did once, slightly tongue in cheek, try to argue that we should welcome them back to rehabilitate them into society. I was roundly attacked by the Lib Dems, who I thought were the caring party.

The coalition government in the last session of Parliament tried to implement the Clegg plan: a bizarre mixture of elected and appointed, with different classes of peers receiving different remuneration, but it was quite rightly thrown out by the Commons before it reached the Lords.