Tim Walker

Mandrake

Hereditary Fears Disappear

It was payday for a great many of Keir Starmer’s Camden cronies, party donors, and other Labour place men and women when he dished out peerages for them shortly after he became Prime Minister. He was understandably eager to redress the balance against his party in the upper house – Labour previously had 187 peers in the House of Lords, against the Conservatives’ 273.

A key way of evening it up still further was making good on his manifesto pledge to scrap the hereditaries: a total of 44 of the existing hereditary peers who sit in the Lords because of the accident of birth are Tories, while only four are Labour.

But, what many of Starmer’s new peers don’t seem to understand is that, with the honour comes responsibility – not least to turn out to vote on issues that are fundamental to the party’s legislative programme and electoral prospects.

A desultory turnout for the report stage of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill resulted in an amendment by the Conservative peer Lord Stephen Parkinson being passed that in effect kicked the issue into the long grass – with its provision to reduce the number of hereditary peers rather than abolish them all at once. The Lords backed the move by 280 votes to 243.