Peerless

Congratulations to Sir Michael Bichard, Chairman of the Design Council and Director of the Institute for Government; Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain’s most successful Paralympian; Tony Hall, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House and Chairman of the Cultural Olympiad; and Professor Ajay Kakkar, surgeon and medical researcher with a special interest in thrombosis. All will make admirable Peers of this Realm, I am sure.

In October 2008, I applied to be a People’s Peer. Of course, I didn’t expect to get it. But I submitted my case to the House of Lords Appointments Commission. The top and bottom of it was that, God willing, I offered several decades of representation to a position and numerous consequent views which, despite having a considerable following in the country at large, are not currently represented within the parliamentary process.

The removal of the hereditaries has greatly upped the age profile: the idea that Peers have always at least ordinarily been old is historically illiterate, and that history goes all the way up into the last decade; it used to be quite common to inherit in childhood, or even at birth as a posthumous son, and then take one’s seat at 21, which, if not 18, is still the minimum age for election as an elected hereditary.

That removal has also massively reduced the representation of everywhere outside London, including the North, with the North East particularly hard done by. That Londonisation was greatly exacerbated by Blair’s creation of huge numbers of what were almost exclusively very metropolitan Peers indeed. Add in that there is no mixed-race person in either House, that there is no one born in a remaining British Overseas Territory in either House, that no one born in Saint Helena has ever sat in either House, and that there is still (indeed, increasingly) the age-old under-representation of those of us who attended either or both of state schools and non-Oxbridge universities.

Anyway, it took them until April 2009 to write back saying “Don’t call us”. I mean, how heavy is the workload at the House of Lords Appointments Commission? No surprise there, of course. But the letter basically said, even if not in these words, that they had had a lot of applications from people like me, and that the other applicants had been more distinguished. That is perfectly possible.

So I am monitoring appointments. Of Sir Michael, Dame Tanni, Mr Hall and Professor Kakkar, which is from the North East? Which went to a state school? Which holds a non-Oxbridge degree? Which was born in a remaining British Overseas Territory, or specifically in Saint Helena? Which is mixed-race? Which represents a return to the days when young men inherited their fathers’ seats in childhood or at birth and then took those seats at 21, not an age for which I am in any danger of being mistaken? And which is a pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker, anti-war, economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriot? There certainly are people more distinguished than I in each of those categories. Which of Sir Michael, Dame Tanni, Mr Hall and Professor Kakkar is among them?

And which of them offers the continuing representation of that which the Constitutional Reform Bill will remove, with the full support of the Tories, by removing the last of the hereditaries? Socially conscientious and historically conscious. Rural and provincial. Classically educated and church-based. Agrarian, and thus broadly or strongly anti-capitalist, aware of the importance of State economic action in protecting social and cultural goods, and rooted in the most militant living tradition of direct action in such causes. With the Union and the Commonwealth literally bred into them. Sceptical of American hegemony, and even more so of the Israel First lobby. Which of Sir Michael, Dame Tanni, Mr Hall and Professor Kakkar embodies this tradition?