The last of the Lords

LONDON — “I was frightened,” says Hugh Trenchard, as he recalls being told as a boy that he would one day take his father’s place in the U.K.’s House of Lords.

Trenchard is speaking over a fine-china cup of coffee in the British parliament’s oak-paneled Peers’ Guest Room. Visitors may enter such spaces only if accompanied by a member of the House of Lords.

Nobody here refers to Trenchard as “Hugh.” To staff, he is “my Lord;” in correspondence “the Viscount Trenchard.”

The moniker was earned when Trenchard’s father died in 1987 and Trenchard inherited the viscount title. The peerage had been created in 1930 for his grandfather, a former head of the air force, by King George V.

“I remember I didn’t like being ‘the honorable,’” he says, referring to the courtesy title bestowed upon the sons of viscounts within Britain’s archaic aristocracy.

“I just wanted to be the same as the other boys. Children don’t like being different, do they?”

But this accident of birth entitles Trenchard to help make Britain’s laws. Indeed, he has voted on legislation and sat in the U.K. parliament’s unelected upper chamber for most of his life — one of 92 remaining “hereditary peers” who inherited their seats directly from their fathers. Democracy does not get a look-in.

It’s an anachronism which Britain’s newly-elected Labour government says it’s determined to end.

But House of Lords reform — described by the political historian Peter Hennessy as “the Bermuda triangle of politics” — is a notoriously difficult task. And new Prime Minister Keir Starmer could get more than he bargained for as he takes it on.

Unfinished revolution

Starmer is picking up a baton last dropped by his Labour predecessor Tony Blair back at the turn of the millennium.

When Blair swept away the vast majority of hereditary peers as part of a major Lords shakeup in 1999, he boosted the number of so-called life peers to replace them.

Just like the hereditaries, these lawmakers receive a permanent place in the Lords without a democratic vote, but are hand-picked by senior politicians and then rubber-stamped by the monarch.

Essentially, they are political appointees — and crucially, they do not inherit or pass on their title when they die.

Yet Blair’s was an unfinished revolution. He struck a deal with more traditionally-minded Conservatives to let 92 aristocrats keep their seats in the upper chamber. The remaining 800-or-so hereditary peers around Britain who missed out on seats now jostle it out for limited places when one of their existing number dies or retires.

Blair’s intention was always to do away with the hereditary peers eventually — but no prime minister since has had the stomach to take on the challenge of such thorny constitutional reform.

Successive attempts since the Blair years have foundered. And even the current, reinvigorated Labour Party — riding high after a landslide election win in July — has scaled back its ambitions since Starmer vowed two years ago to abolish the unelected Lords altogether. 

Starmer’s election-winning manifesto pledged to get rid of the remaining hereditary peers in parliament, impose a mandatory retirement age of 80 for life peers and hold a wider consultation on the future of the chamber. Yet only the first measure made it into Labour’s legislative program for its first year in office.

Many peers themselves acknowledge they are on borrowed time.

John Attlee, whose earldom was created for his grandfather, the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, admits: “Like every hereditary peer since 1911, I thought the system would change before it was my turn.”

‘Studs first’

Part of the reason it has proved so difficult to reconstitute the overpopulated and anachronistic upper chamber, however, is that while almost everyone says this should happen, hardly anyone can agree on how to do it. 

The opposition Conservatives have not yet adopted an official position on Labour’s reform plans, though the party’s shadow leader in the Lords, Nicholas True, greeted the proposals with deep ambivalence in a debate last month. 

Those opposed to the idea — which, unsurprisingly, includes most hereditary peers — complain the plan is incomplete, partisan (because most hereditary peers are Tory) and gives too much power to the prime minister.

Conservative peer Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith, better known as Lord Strathclyde, is a former leader of the Lords who helped secure the 1999 deal to save a rump of hereditaries. 

He is no fan of Labour’s drive to shake things up. “As a result of this, for the first time ever the House of Lords will be a creature of statute appointed by the prime minister, and I am very uncomfortable with that,” he said.

Jim Bethell, another Conservative former minister who sits in the Lords as an hereditary peer, said: “To go in studs-first from the outset in order to try to improve the electoral maths of this government is a shame, and marks a change in tone in the relationship between the Commons and the Lords.”

Even within the House of Lords itself, it’s hard to find anyone willing to defend the hereditary principle. But there are deep misgivings at the idea of a wholly-appointed chamber, particularly with a more fundamental overhaul punted into the long grass.

Bad blood  

Regardless of the viscounts’ grumbling, Labour’s bill is all but guaranteed to pass, thanks to a longstanding convention that the House of Lords cannot block a government manifesto promise.

In a sign of the party’s seriousness about taking on the thorny issue, respected constitutional affairs expert Jess Sargeant has moved from the Labour Together Starmerite think tank, to a civil service role within the Cabinet Office to lead on Lords reform.

Yet Labour is being put on notice. Several peers warned that expending time and good will on expunging the hereditaries would severely limit the appetite on all sides to execute Labour’s more sweeping Lords reforms.

“These constitutional things are always more complicated than they first seem,” Strathclyde said. “I don’t doubt if they really want it, it will happen. But it may have an impact on other bills.”

A cross bench member of the Lords, granted anonymity to speak frankly, predicted axing the aristocrats would “cost the government a lot of time and cause an awful lot of bad feeling, which might threaten other things they want to do.”

Labour figures insist they are not intending to use abolition of the hereditary peers as window dressing and say they are committed to further reform of the Lords. 

One person involved in drawing up the plans pointed out that Lords reform is attractive to the new government for a number of reasons: it is popular, cost-free, a unifying cause for the Labour Party and contains a pleasing whiff of class warfare.

But above all that, they said it chimes with Starmer’s desire to rebuild trust in politics. “It’s not just about changing the people who are operating the system. Some changes to the system are needed.”

Time may be running out for Trenchard and his cohort — but don’t expect them to go quietly. 

Emilio Casalicchio contributed reporting.