A sign of the Times - Lords reform

"The cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it," Walter Bagehot (1826-77)

My first visit to the House of Lords was in the early 1980s as a guest of Lord Kagan, the man whose factory made and supplied the famous Gannex raincoat to Harold Wilson when prime minister.

It was during this visit that I realised that the House was doubling as a magnificent Gentlemen’s club for a privileged few, including Kagan who, like Lord Archer at a later date, could not be stripped of his peerage for something as trivial as a stretch in prison. Kagan had served a jail term for stealing some batches of indigo dye.

Sharing a glass of port with Kagan and some of his cronies, I met Lord Saint Oswald, the fourth baron ( the family seat is Nostell Priory in Wakefield), who told me how he had been singled out to face a firing squad during the Spanish Civil War only to be reprieved at the last moment.

Another of Kagan’s pals, a Lord Morris (there are several and I’m not sure which one he was) showed me around the rest of the place. He pointed to some bound copies of the Times and asked my date of birth so he could look up the birth notice. It was inconceivable for this blue blood that my parents might have neglected this social convention in favour of a line in their local newspaper.

I know this is silly but I never forgot that episode and, when our first son was born, one of the first things I did was place a notice in the Times. If it was good enough for Lord Morris it was good enough for my lad.

All of this might explain why I greeted the vote in favour of a wholly elected second chamber with a sense of joy. The patronage and ostentatation is an anachronism that should have been done away with years ago.

The Lords are to discuss the proposal next week. I expect they'll be against it. The huffing and puffing and not "not done yet", "constitutional catastrophe", "end of our great democracy" rhetoric has already begun. I just hope the Government now has the stomach to go with the will of Parliament. There should be no reprieve this time.