Lords of excess? What really goes on in the Upper House
There cannot be many peers who spent the night before their introduction to the House of Lords at a Premier Inn, but John Bird – now Baron Bird of Notting Hill – was sworn in 15 months ago having stayed in one of the hotel’s family rooms with his wife and children, before crossing London by bus and tube to don his ermine robe.
The 71-year-old founder of The Big Issue – the magazine sold by the homeless – is not usually lacking in confidence, but taking the oath of allegiance in his finery was daunting: “When I walked in I felt a bit like the accused – as if I was young again and walking into the old court of London sessions to be judged….”
His maiden speech took fellow peers back to that misspent youth. “Someone asked how did I get into the House of Lords and I said ‘by lying, cheating and stealing’,” he began, to shocked laughter. “But if I had not gone through that… I would never have been able to get out and learn to read and write in a boys’ prison at the age of 16”.
He spoke of his childhood in orphanages, and how, in his youth, he sometimes slept on a bench in the park next to the Lords and spent a few weeks employed in its kitchens, washing up.
Now, as a “people’s peer” – one of a number of non-party-political peers appointed by a commission established to change the Upper House’s aristos-in-ermine image - he scrutinises legislation from ‘the other place” (the House of Commons) and eats lunch at the Lords’ long table which, one peer suggests mischievously, “is the place from which the country is really governed”.
The long table, the ermine robes, the House’s eccentric inhabitants and curious traditions – peers only say “good afternoon” once prayers have been said, so it is sometimes still morning in the House at 2pm – are all on display in the BBC’s new fly-on-the-wall documentary series, Meet the Lords, which begins on Monday night.
It adds up to an intriguing glimpse inside an institution that sharply divides opinion. Some think the Lords too old (the majority are over 70), too male (only around one quarter are women) and that there are just too many (more than 800, making it the biggest legislative body outside China).
Most imagine a typical lord to be like hereditary peer Lord Palmer, who still uses the coat hook that belonged to his great-grandfather and lives in a grand mansion in Scotland with a silver staircase copied from Versailles. These days, however, the second chamber is packed with a unique concentration of expertise: former surgeons, senior soldiers, teachers, leading scientists, successful businessmen and social reformers.
They’ll collect up to £300 a day, of course, just for turning up. Baroness d’Souza (scientist and former Lord Speaker Frances d’Souza) set feathers flying last week when she claimed that some took the money but did nothing to earn it, recalling an occasion when she saw one “who shall be utterly nameless” draw up in a taxi and run to the peer’s entrance “presumably to show that he’d attended… I think that we have lost the sense of honour that used to pertain.”
D’Souza, who once spent £230 of public money keeping a taxi waiting while she attended an opera one mile away from the Houses of Parliament (which her spokesman later described as a “security requirement”), is now staying silent until the storm blows over.
Let’s hope she doesn’t run into Lord Dobbs, who as Michael Dobbs was an advisor to Margaret Thatcher and wrote the classic political thriller House of Cards. “I was really upset by Frances D’Souza’s comments” he says. “I think they’re inaccurate, they’re wrong, they’re wrong, they’re wrong. If that were the House of Lords then I would not wish to be part of it. Everybody can find individuals in any institution that don’t play the game as it ought to be done.”
Dobbs says the House worked beyond midnight twice last week and there is a serious and on-going discussion about how it can bring itself up to date. “It’s been suggested we ditch the robes because they make us look like Gilbert and Sullivan characters. I would be very sad and sorry to lose those robes but perhaps in the 21st century it’s necessary to forge a more businesslike image.”
Day rates aside – Lord Palmer points out that “a high-powered accountant or lawyer is charging £600 an hour and we get £300 a day – everyone seems to agree the Lords is ripe for reform. Some attempts have already been made: in 1999 the House of Lords Act whittled down several hundred hereditary peers to 92. The following year the commission to appoint “people’s peers” was set up. And in 2015, Lord Strathclyde was instructed by David Cameron to look at curbing peers’ powers, after they blocked George Osborne’s plan to cut tax credits.
His recommendations were dropped by the government in November, suggesting Theresa May was seeking to build a more constructive relationship with the Lords than her predecessor. It remains to be seen whether her potential double defeat over the Brexit Bill, as peers from across parties back extra protections for EU citizens and a veto on the final deal, will herald a reversal in that position.
The current drive, led by the Lords speaker, Lord Fowler (formerly Norman Fowler, secretary of state for health in Margaret Thatcher’s government) is to make major cuts. Though he vehemently rejected characterisation of the Lords as bloated and archaic, he admitted when appointed last September that the size of the House has become a distraction from the very good work that is done there.
“There are – how should I put it? – a few passengers. I don’t disagree with that. But the characteristic of the Lords is that it’s hardworking and conscientious.”
Though the three-part documentary includes the extraordinary sight of a trouserless Black Rod (Lt General David Leakey) scrambling into his tights and buckle shoes for the daily parade that opens parliamentary business, it also shows peers diligently poring over the detail of the Government’s housing Bill last spring and former Labour MP Lord Dub’s efforts to persuade the Government to allow unaccompanied refugee children into Britain.
Lord Blunkett (former Labour home secretary David Blunkett) had some bruising encounters with the Lords as a cabinet minister – but after 17 months in its ranks, he sees things differently: “I’ve heard some of the best speeches of my political life here.”
He is pro-reform, hoping to downsize overall numbers and make the House more representative of all the regions of the UK, but still believes a revising chamber is a governmental asset: “I wouldn’t want a chamber that had the legitimacy to challenge the Commons. [But] in retrospect, on major issues like counterterrorism and the big criminal justice and sentencing act I piloted through in 2003, the Lords really did make a big contribution to getting it right because there was expertise."
Reform, so far, has produced another Lords peculiarity: the hereditary peers are now the only ones who have to stand for election (fellow hereditaries vote in a new member when a seat becomes available). Lord Borwick, a successful businessman and now Conservative whip, says he got “no votes at all, nul points” when he first stood for the House but his children persuaded him to try again.
“You very seldom see a politician prepared to admit he stood for election and got no votes,” he says cheerfully. “But I did and I stood again and it’s been a really invigorating, enormous fun occupation. And I’ve never worked so hard for so little pay in my life.”
Meet the Lords is on BBC2 on Monday at 9pm
