'We’ve been on borrowed time all my life': the end of hereditary peers
House of Lords, November 1999: Lord Savile casts his vote in hereditary peer elections | Image by: John Stillwell / Alamy
5 min read
The departure of the last of the hereditary peers will be a sadness to some, but Eleanor Doughty looks back on a long history of aristocratic indifference to the Upper Chamber
Lords had better things to do. No less a peer than Lord Salisbury, the last prime minister to sit on the red benches, offered a list of things that might be considered more “lively and exciting compared to an ordinary debate in the House of Lords”. It included a Quaker “jollification”, a French horse-race and even a Presbyterian psalm. It was, he continued, a “paradise of bores”.
A staunch defender of the Upper Chamber, the marquess nevertheless complained bitterly that too many of his class treated it as “a place for passing an idle hour or two before dinner”.
Nothing is as likely as to stir attachment as the threat of removal, however. When the Lords were threatened by Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George in 1909, the dukes stood around shouting a lot about how they had a jolly good mind to cancel their subscriptions to the local football club as a result. Lloyd George swiftly cut off their legs – or at least their right to veto money bills – and after a little fussing they quietened down again for another half-century and reverted to their former indifference.
As one peer puts it, “the very grand ones never came – they couldn’t be bothered and had better things to do”.
Indeed, between 1955 and 1960, only eight of the 27 non-royal dukes spoke in the Lords at all. It is no wonder that the late clerk of the parliaments Sir John Sainty remembered how the Lords he joined as a junior clerk in 1959 “wasn’t a place of aristocrats” and how “it was extremely unusual for a landed nobleman to spend any time at the Lords”.
A long, slow uneventful century followed Asquith’s Parliament Act of 1911 – only slightly troubled by the introduction of the life peers in 1958. Succour came for those who had long awaited the reintroduction of the phrase ‘House of Lords reform’ with New Labour’s swift, partial execution of the bulk of ‘hereds’ in 1999 and the moment at which the leader of the Lords Baroness Jay bade her soon-to-be former colleagues “thank you and goodbye”.
But what of the lords and the Lords today? What is the appropriate way to leave an institution that your forebears have (probably) been involved with for hundreds of years? With grace – and, it is hoped, more tact than last time.
“Everybody was prepared to go quietly in 1999,” one current hereditary peer remembers. “But it was done in the most unpleasant way. Some people had given their life to the place only to be ushered out and told, ‘be gone by Friday’.”
“I was lucky,” remembers another who was saved. “I got elected but an awful lot of people were incredibly sad and some died of a sort of heartbreak.” Even life peers on the Labour benches were in tears, says a former member who was retained in 1999 but has since retired: “It was a horrible day, it is ever imprinted on my mind.”
In the intervening 26 years, the peers – though, as they admit, they may be just slightly partial – have got on with the job that no one thought they could do, or that they would ever need to do. One peer in his 50s remembers how his father was “very clear that the Lords will be taken away before you come round to it”. Nowadays, they turn up: as the consititional expert and life peer Philip Norton told me earlier in the year, “we know that hereditary peers are slightly more active than life peers”. They sit on select committees and join All-Party Parliamentary Groups – and provide some balance.
As one hereditary crossbencher says: “Those that have joined in my time are an interesting and eclectic bunch of talents – the kind of people that you would not get in Parliament by any other means.
“Plus, the House of Lords will become a lot less exciting when the Duke of Wellington isn’t there.”
Most are resigned to their fate – even if they appear, on occasion, slightly salty. As the former leader of the Lords and hereditary peer Lord Strathclyde told me last year, the Prime Minister is “creating a second Chamber into which the only way is by the Prime Minister ticking your name in a box. We used to complain to the United Nations about countries that did that.” The principal concern, says a well-regarded Conservative peer, is a constitutional one. “The Lords is there to act as a break on the power of the executive. The more one dilutes that independence, the more power accrues to the executive.”
Lord Strathclyde’s tongue is slightly in his cheek when he says those who try to defend the hereditary principle go mad after a while.
For those who have benefited from an accident of birth, well, as one peer in his 60s puts it, “we’ve been on borrowed time all my life”. The important lesson to learn, he says, is that politics is like tennis: “You have to play every point because you have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty is published by Hutchinson
