As far as second acts go, public life in post-imperial Britain offers two distinct options. For those who hail from what we might loosely describe as the world of entertainment, there is the jungle or the dancing; for those from Westminster, there is the House of Lords.
Occasionally, someone has a shot at both. It could have gone either way for Ed Balls this year, but once the Labour leadership election has ascended to its expected conclusion, and the former chancellor judges that the possibility of embarrassing his wife has receded, I strongly urge Balls to go for sequins rather than ermine. There is literally nothing he could inflict on a paso doble that would be more wantonly humiliating than being part of a second chamber that includes the long-time anti-Lords campaigner Peter Hain – now Lord Hain.
Following the publication of the latest honours list, there is absolutely no doubt about it any longer: even doing I’m a Celebrity is more edifying than doing the Lords. Settling down to some kangaroo anus with a fallen Hollyoaks star is the last word in dignity compared with settling down for an after-lunch snooze on the red benches next to Douglas Hogg, who has just been made a life peer (he is already a viscount, but clearly the Tories want him to be “operational”).
A breakout star of the expenses scandal, the last anyone really heard of Hogg was his claim for second home services including the cleaning of his moat, the tuning of his piano and the retention of a full-time housekeeper. Dear old Douglas. Reading of his elevation I wondered idly what had happened to his erstwhile neighbouring MP in Lincolnshire, Quentin Davies, who once submitted a receipt for £20,700 of work on the bell tower of his second hovel. “The bell tower is an integral part of the roof,” he fumed defensively back then. Inevitably, I see Quentin was made a peer in 2010. Still, good to have the old gang back together.
In general the latest list of dissolution honours is so self-parodically venal that it resembles a dare. It could almost prompt Lord Sewel to stage a return, on the basis that even he couldn’t bring this house into any more disrepute. Almost, but not quite.
That said, it is not all happy endings (in the Cinderella sense, as opposed to the Lord Sewel one). It’s hard lines for Jack Straw, whose failure to make the cut on this last set of Labour nominations before a widely predicted Jeremy Corbyn victory in the leadership election probably suggests his ship has sailed. Then again, perhaps Corbyn will offer sarcastic honours, allowing Blairites to be ennobled only if they style themselves things like Lord Straw of Black Site. Failing that, I should now like to see Jack take a leaf out of the Hamiltons’ playbook, and bow to demands for his Baron Hardup this panto season.
Elsewhere, there’s a lot of snobbery about the Ultimo boss, Michelle Mone, being elevated to the peerage. My feeling is that it’s rather better to have bra moguls in the Lords than men who simply wear bras while blowing rails and calling Asian women “whores”. But when even the Daily Mail is judging the Lords “a dump full of dregs and drongos”, you have to think things have come to a not very pretty pass.
Of course, not everyone in the Lords is a dreg or a drongo. And the irony is that the second chamber has been more effective than the first in recent years – sometimes not even by accident.
And non-dregs are reminded that resistance is very much in vogue. Over in the other chamber, Labour’s Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt have reportedly formed a group dubbed “the resistance”, to fight back against an anticipated victory for Corbyn in the leadership contest. If only a similar effort could be got up by lords who regard themselves as worthy of the name to agitate against the likes of Jeffrey Archer and Douglas Hogg and all the donors and bag-carriers. I was going to say they could call themselves the Lords Resistance Army, though I understand that name has already been taken by a marginally less appealing cast of characters.
Back in 2012 – shortly before the coalition plan for Lords reform went tits up – an eye-catching poll found that 69% of the public supported a reformed House of Lords, with just 5% backing the status quo, a fully appointed second chamber (and that was yonks before this list, and before Lord Sewel was filmed whingeing about being paid £200 a day to a woman he’d hired for £200 a night).
And who can blame the public for this view? To a generation that has been mesmerised by reality programmes, the House of Lords appears a broken format. In some ways, it is familiar to aficionados of island- or mansion-based shows. Lots of people who will conflict with each other are put in one place for a substantial fee. Unfortunately, no one can vote any of them out.
Given the raging antipathy to tackling serious reform of the Lords among MPs who one day will be pensioned off to it, perhaps we can start with baby steps, and just the smallest tweaks to the format. Here’s my suggestion: lords would not be deprived of their £300-a-day allowance, but they would have to queue up to collect it. The cash would be given in used notes, in an envelope, and dispensed through a small window. The key thing is that the queue would be filmed, and the live stream made available via the parliament website.
Perhaps it could be shown in split screen with the chamber (there would, naturally, always be more people in the queue than the chamber). I suspect the experience of watching the House of Lords at work in this way would be oddly mesmerising, as watching people brush their teeth in the Big Brother house all the way back in the very first series oddly was.
Bookmakers could offer odds on who could clock in for the cash and clock out for the day most speedily. Len Goodman could mark their footwork. It would be a bargain-basement piece of open democracy, really putting the public inside the action of our thrillingly malfunctioning legislature. Call it Lords-cam. Actually, in the circumstances, let’s lose the hyphen.
