Sir Keir Starmer says the House of Lords is ‘indefensible’. It is an odd thing to say about an institution which has lasted more than 700 years. It is slightly like saying the common law is indefensible, and extremely like saying that the monarchy is indefensible (which is, I think we know, what Sir Keir does actually believe). There are several defences to be made for the Lords. They are just not, strictly speaking, democratic ones. But I must stick to my rule (see last week) of avoiding the subject of House of Lords reform. The funniest bit of Sir Keir’s constitutional plans is that he chooses to justify them in economic terms. Apparently, his new layer of elected regional non-Lords will bring new prosperity to the United Kingdom. As the word suggests, a constitution means a thing knit together, a way of governing a whole realm, developing over centuries. It is not a corporate plan for UK plc to year-end X. I sense an uneasiness in Sir Keir, both about Lords reform (the pointless aggravation) and about his own error in getting Gordon Brown to come up with the new ideas. Mr Brown is a very difficult politician. He combines being a genuinely big personality who overshadows his colleagues and successors with being stupefyingly boring and stale in his public utterances.
Sir Keir’s latest answer to the manifold inefficiencies of the NHS is to hire more staff. It is fascinating that no political leader since Covid dares to bring forward any proposal to make the service more efficient. Take the old problem of blocked beds. It is well known that many are caused by having no suitable care into which elderly patients can be discharged, but there are other difficulties which ought to be easier to remedy. One is that hospitals, like other public services, such as railways – but unlike private ones, such as supermarkets – see the weekends as a period of rest. It is commonplace – it happened this year to my wife – to come into hospital on a weekday, then be unable to find a doctor with the power of discharge on a Friday and thus be stuck in hospital all weekend because no one with decision-making authority will show up until Monday morning, or even Monday afternoon. Every weekend, therefore, there will be tens of thousands of patients occupying hospital beds for three superfluous nights. The average cost is something like £400 per bed per night. Both the patient kept in and the patient kept out tend to deteriorate as a result.
On a similar train of thought, I recently saw the headline ‘GPs’ long hours are anti-women and should be cut, say doctors’. The women referred to are doctors. Long hours are ‘patriarchal’, the medics say. No mention in the whole story of the possible inconvenience of shorter hours to the much, much larger number of women – and men – known, not inaptly, as patients.
Stephen David Jones has just been imprisoned for 12 years for fraud. This is allegedly the longest sentence ever handed down to a lawyer, which suggests astonishing past leniency towards the profession. I have a young friend, ‘Harry’, an immigrant, who was fooled by Jones. The entrapment worked as follows. Harry, a convert to Christianity, attended Holy Trinity, Brompton, the famous evangelical church. He was introduced to Jones by a close business associate at HTB. Soon Stephen David Jones was inviting him to suppers at his house. Harry liked this soft-spoken, well-educated, religious man and saw him almost as his guide: ‘He was my standard of what to expect.’ Trustingly, he made Stephen David his lawyer and then his financial adviser. Jones’s firm, Jirehouse, said on its website that it was inspired by ‘Judaeo-Christian teachings’. Each meeting room in its offices was named after a different book of the Bible (was there one called Revelation?). Although becoming a little suspicious about high, opaque fees, Harry noticed nothing worse until an email for a ‘very private investment opportunity’ arriving on Christmas Eve 2018 demanded a large sum of money which would be repaid in three months. On family advice, Harry didn’t bite. In the end, Jones was privately (and successfully) prosecuted by an American property company whom he had cheated, after the police and the CPS did nothing. I have occasionally heard of similar characters in churches, especially evangelical churches. HTB’s congregation is not only large and devout but also, on average, very rich. Natural territory for the sort of person for whom the words ‘prophet’ and ‘profit’ are interchangeable. Friendship and shared faith are the worst way to start a professional financial relationship, Harry now believes.
There is quite a long queue of people expecting to be involved in the coronation who have still not been informed of what is happening. The latest, I gather, is the Girdlers Company which, as in 1953, is expecting to provide the stole for the ceremony. It has put aside £50,000 to pay the Royal School of Needlework for the task but, despite repeated requests, has heard no word from Buckingham Palace.
I have just re-read ‘Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit’. Bertie wants to spend Christmas at Lady Wickham’s country place, Skeldings, thus getting close to her lovely daughter, Roberta. Jeeves disapproves of Miss Wickham (‘I would always hesitate to recommend as a life’s companion a young lady with quite such a vivid shade of red hair’), but his real reason for opposing the Skeldings trip is that Bertie has earlier booked Christmas in Monte Carlo, and Jeeves, Bertie notes, has been looking forward to exercising his ‘keen sporting streak’ at the gaming tables. Bertie chides him: ‘In the first place, does one get the Yule-tide spirit at a spot like Monte Carlo?’ ‘Does one desire the Yule-tide spirit, sir?’ Jeeves replies. Who, after the age of 30, has not sometimes asked himself that question?
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