At least, though, with luck it should be the last time that any such thing can possibly happen. If Lord Wakeham's royal commission on House of Lords reform does nothing else, it should at least see to it that no prime minister gets away with such a brazen act of posthumous patronage again - made worse, if anything, in this case by the fact that it was all carried out with the active collusion and full connivance of the two main opposition parties, both only too anxious to see to it that their own followers got a fair share of the available rewards.
Of course, the House of Lords has long and notoriously provided a parking lot for old and clapped-out political vehicles. But if that is what it essentially is, should it not be stripped of its whole flummery aspect and recognised for the working politicians' eventide home that it has become?
Certainly, if we take at face value the Labour party's manifesto pledge to remove hereditary peers from the second chamber's membership, then it seems only logical that the whole cap-doffing element (and I jest not - that is exactly what our newest peers, Robert Fellowes, Dennis Stevenson and Norman Foster, will have to do ) should go out of the window at the same time.
Admittedly, thanks to the guile of Lord Cranborne, it now seems likely that some 91 hereditary peers will survive, at least through the transition stage. But with dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and even the vast majority of barons all expelled, it really will be what Enoch Powell would have called "a nonsense" to go on treating the second chamber as if it were still made up of feudal magnificos and the owners of great estates. Manifestly - stuffed to the gills with life-trippers on some trendy gravy train - it will have ceased to be anything of the sort.
No doubt, its present members can be counted upon to resist any change to their own titles or their collective nomenclature. (There is, it has truly been said, no greater traditionalist than a recently created Labour life peer.)
But one of the first duties of Lord Wakeham and his royal commission colleagues must surely be to come up with a new designation for those who from now on - with their hereditary brethren cast out into the cold - will form Britain's largely (and possibly even exclusively) nominated second chamber.
Traditionally, through the various timid steps at reform - and all the present Labour government is doing is redeeming a promise Asquith originally made in 1911 - the House of Lords has been a dab hand at getting the best of both worlds. When in 1958 Harold Macmillan invented the notion of life peers - or rather borrowed the concept from the already existing ranks of the Law Lords - he managed to pull off a very cunning trick. With his own allegiance to the hereditary principle hardly open to doubt (he seems certain now to be the last hereditary earl ever to be created) he contrived to slip into the life peerages act a provision that might well have been thought to contradict the underlying ethos of the whole measure.
Whether they liked it or not - and Randolph Churchill did not like it at all when his mother in 1966 accepted Harold Wilson's invitation to become a life baroness - all children of life peers or peeresses automatically and willy-nilly became "honourables". It is hard to conceive of a more open piece of defiance against the entire principle on which this particular act of parliament was supposed to be based.
It was all the more flagrant a departure from any genuine democratising purpose since there already existed a model which - to anyone but Macmillan - would probably have appeared as the ready-made precedent for the treatment of life peers and peeresses. If Lord Wakeham wants to demonstrate that, unlike Macmillan, he is no snob, then he should look carefully at the case of the Anglican bishops in the House of Lords. Used as they are to criticism -and at 26-strong there may well be too many of them - they nevertheless have one great thing going for them. In contrast to the Lords Temporal, the Lords Spiritual have no marks of social distinction attached to them at all. Their children are not "Honourables", the wife even of the Archbishop of Canterbury remains plain Mrs Carey and, unless they happen to be one of the two Archbishops (or a politically sympathetic Bishop of Liverpool) they lose their place as legislators the moment they lay down their administrative burdens in their dioceses.
If Lord Wakeham and his colleagues require a prototype for a reformed, post-millennium House of Lords, they need look no further than the present Bishops' Bench in the second chamber. At least there, meritocracy reigns without any resort to a bogus form of pseudo-aristocracy.
And if the royal commission eventually feels moved to take one modest modernising step further, it should surely simply announce that in a revised upper house, the only reference to its dynastic origins would be found in the use of the letters "LP" (to denote lord of parliament as opposed to member of parliament) by those included among its members.
Come to think of it, that would have the additional advantage of ridding the place of its most ridiculous surviving anachronism of all - Garter King of Arms with his absurd dressing-up box - at the same time.
Anthony Howard is a former deputy editor of the Observer and is writing a biography of Michael Heseltine
