In which forthcoming by-election does one candidate’s election address boast that he was the ‘last Captain of Boats [at Eton] to win the Ladies Plate at Henley in 1960’, while one of his rivals says that, at Harrow, ‘unfortunately I did not cover myself with academic glory’? The answer is a by-election among the Conservative hereditary peers. Under the Blair reforms of the Lords, the hereditaries elected their own 92 representatives, and the then Lord Cranborne (now Lord Salisbury) persuaded Labour (who saw the whole thing as an interim measure before abolition) to permit by-elections — which was foolish from their point of view, because, without replacements, the hereditaries would quickly have dwindled away. Voting takes place within parties. In this case, a Tory, Lord Ferrers, died. The electorate consists of 48 men, and no women, voting on 5 February, by Single Transferable Vote. There are no fewer than 27 candidates for the single vacancy.
It is turning into a spirited contest, because one candidate is splitting the voters. Viscount Hailsham, better known as Douglas Hogg, is the most obviously qualified hopeful, being a former Cabinet minister, MP, and a QC. He has some strong supporters. But his record is also his problem. The life peerage is full of former Cabinet ministers, and some hereditaries do not want to use their vote to compensate for the fact that David Cameron failed to ennoble Hogg because of the famous incident over claiming Commons expenses to clean his moat. One subset of the Upper House, a place unusually expert on moats, feels that Hogg’s moat was not a ‘proper’ one, and he should not have so described it. Another thinks he has been terribly traduced. Yet another subset points out that Hogg’s wife, Sarah, is already in the House of Lords, and ‘That’s enough Hoggs.’ The terms which the electors use are studiously courteous, and so I notice that the anti-Hoggists have a preferred phrase: ‘Youth is a useful asset,’ they say. Douglas Hogg/Hailsham is 68.
In the Lords, as in the Vatican, ‘youth’ is a term happily applied to anyone aged 60 or below. In this category, the leading candidates are the Earl of Oxford and Asquith (that’s one person, by the way), who is 60 and a former MI6 officer; Viscount Ridley, better known to Spectator readers as Matt Ridley, the distinguished writer on science, the environment and political economy; the businessman Lord Borwick; and the Earl of Clanwilliam, a charmer from the chiaroscuro world of Russian commerce. In his election address, Lord Clanwilliam says he has ‘no pile in the Shires’ — a tactical mistake, I feel, since the majority of the electorate does. The youngest candidate, born 1971, is Lord Somerleyton, who last year set up the Hot Chips kiosk chain.
It turns out that the 48 voters want two things with which the House of Lords is not traditionally associated. The first is that they need someone who will work very hard. They mutter that too many life peers rest on their withering laurels and do not do their bit: it is the hereditaries who must swink in the field of legislation. They suspect that the older ones are less likely to do this. The second quality sought is keen intelligence. Now that the Clegg reforms have failed, the stopgap approach is gradually being replaced by a longer view. Why not get the best people you can find who, unlike most modern MPs, have standing and experience in the outside world, roots in places other than London, and some specialist expertise? ‘We’ve had enough good eggs,’ one elector tells me, ‘now we want intellectual power.’ I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a revolutionary sentiment.
The British attitude to snow has changed hugely because of the different role of the weather forecast. The Met Office seems to feel the need to warn of disaster all the time, and so people pre-empt the weather much more than in the past, leaving for their destinations earlier, or cancelling events which bad weather might affect. This is, broadly speaking, a mistake. People should ask themselves why forecasters issue these dire warnings. It is surely because we live in age of high expectations and litigation, and so all providers of services are obsessed with covering themselves against trouble later. ‘Best before’ marks on food should not be taken very seriously because they are there to protect the retailer rather than give accurate advice to the shopper. So it is with weather warnings.
On a crowded train from the frozen north to the even more frozen south at the weekend, a party of teenage boys with a great many cans of beer sat opposite us. My heart sank as their laughs got louder and their conversation more obscene. I was trying very hard to understand a book about exchange rate policy in the 1980s, but my wife was wearing our only pair of earplugs, and concentration was impossible. The boys were all candidates for university, and sour thoughts filled my head that they could do no better than burp and make jokes about sleeping with one another’s sisters. But then a strange thing happened. Along came a man with Down’s Syndrome. The teenagers didn’t know him, but he saw a football match playing on their computer screen, and he stayed to watch, cheer, and insult whichever side it was he didn’t like. He swore quite often himself, and then said, rather sweetly, in his indistinct voice, ‘Pardon my French.’ The yobbish boys treated him with charming courtesy. They shook hands with him, exchanged football talk, expressed polite interest when he said he had a girlfriend, and laughed at his jokes. When, after what seemed like an hour, they came to the tacit view that he had perhaps been with them long enough, they moved him on with an ‘It’s been great to meet you’ manoeuvre that members of the royal family would have envied. Their manners to the handicapped were right in a way that those of my generation at that age certainly were not. Which shows that manners can be taught. Now it only remains for the boys to be taught how to be polite to everyone else.
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