Axing the House of Lords is proving to be a field day for aged nit-pickers

Ian Aitken, Wednesday , July 28, 1999, The Guardian

Apart from a great deal of fun, I have never been entirely sure what I got out of my three years at university 50 years ago. True, this is entirely my own fault, since I chose to specialise in such arcane and, in practical terms, useless subjects as pure logic and the philosophy of Kant. Perhaps the logic helped to clarifying a mind befogged by all that Kant, but I doubt if a detailed knowledge of the critique of pure reason did much for my journalism.

In spite of this, I shall be eternally grateful to at least one of my tutors. He was a man who also treated the university as a place to be enjoyed, and in that spirit he introduced me to the delights of gin, to the usefulness of Alka Seltzer (I used to administer his morning dose before I read him my essay), but above all to the glories of a wonderful book called The Strange Death Of Liberal England.

Written by a superb but sadly unprolific scholar called George Dangerfield, this is probably the finest piece of partisan historical writing since Macaulay. It tells the story of the turbulent, almost revolutionary years between the Liberal landslide of 1906 and the outbreak of the first world war, when this country was riven by causes like Irish home rule, the battle for women's suffrage, the vast industrial unrest of 1911, and last but not least, the bitter campaign by the hereditary House of Lords to retain its right to wreck the legislation of an elected government.

Anyone who hasn't read Dangerfield yet should waste no time in getting a copy. Not only will it provide entertainment of the highest quality; it will also deliver an hilarious introduction to what is going on in the House of Lords right now. For the present government is at last attempting to complete the job begun by Asquith and Lloyd George - namely, to remove the power of an almost-exclusively Conservative aristocracy to sabotage Liberal or Labour governments. Moreover, many of today's participants are directly descended from the actors who cavorted on the same stage nearly a century ago. Their tactics may not be quite so robust as those of their grandfathers, but they are just as grotesque.

In fact, the 1911 instalment of this comedy entailed direct confrontation. The Tory peers - then an even more overwhelming majority of the house, since life peerages had yet to be invented - simply set out to vote down the Liberal government. When Asquith warned them that the King had agreed to create 500 new peerages to out vote them, a majority vowed to fight him in the last ditch. But a few of them were so alarmed by this threat that enough defected to allow Asquith a hairsbreadth victory in the final division.

Dangerfield's pen-portraits of the bizarre cast of characters involved in this charade is one of the glories of his book. As a sampler, take his description of the wildest of the anti-Asquith backwoodsmen, Lord Willoughby de Broke. He was, says Dangerfield, "a genial and sporting young man whose face bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse, an animal which his ancestors had bred and bestridden since the days before Bosworth Field. He honestly believed that England's assorted masses should be treated as he treated his gamekeepers, grooms and indoor staff - that is, kindly but firmly. He was not more than two hundred years behind his time."

The book's description of the scene in the Lords' chamber as the two lines of peers filed past the tellers in the last ditch division, maintaining the uncertainty to the end, is a piece of parliamentary sketch-writing worthy of our own Simon Hoggart. The temperature was nearly 100 that night, and you can almost smell the noble armpits as the drama reached its climax.

The Parliament Act which emerged from this Grand Guignol removed the power of the Lords to block legislation passed by the elected Commons, but left them able delay it. Nor did it disturb the hereditary principle, and subsequent Labour governments - most recently Jim Callaghan's - soon found that their lordships' remaining powers could be decisive in any hard-fought battle with a severely harassed elected government.

But Asquith's half-cocked measure reinforced Labour's long-standing pledge to abolish the House of Lords altogether, or at least to replace it with a more democratic chamber. It is a pledge which has lain so dormant under successive Labour governments as to qualify, under any normal rules of diagnosis, for a formal death certificate. Until, that is, the Blair government brought it back to ... well, a sort of half-life.

So now we have a bill to sack the hereditary peers from the Lords, though we still don't know who or what will take their place. Add to this the fact that the descendant of one of Asquith's leading adversary - the Viscount Cranborne, heir to the Marquis of Salisbury, and a man who seriously argued that hereditary peers were more democratic than elected MPs because they owed their place to pure accident - brokered a deal to save 92 of the hereditaries until the new, reformed chamber is in place. But now his deal has created a new riddle: namely, how the 92 are to be chosen.

Lord Cranborne's own plan is to allow the outgoing hereditaries to elect their own candidates for this temporary life-after-death. Though he denies it, he is clearly hoping it will take so long to decide on a new formula that his 92 zombies will continue to stalk the corridors for many years to come. But his scheme has provided a field day for nit-pickers, with whom the Lords is well supplied.

They were out in force last week, discussing the weird new rules needed to put Cranborne's scheme into effect, in a debate which would have baffled even Dangerfield. As Lord (Bill) Rodgers pointed out from the LibDem frontbench, there would be nothing to prevent a would-be hereditary survivor from buying eternal life by sending a jeroboam of champagne to every member of the prospective electorate.

But it was left to the saintly Lord Longford, now so old that one feels he might easily have spoken in 1911, to deliver the final put-down. He told Lord Cranborne sweetly: "My Lords, I have listened with great interest to the reflections of the noble Viscount. I recall that his great-grandfather left Disraeli's cabinet because Disraeli was introducing the vote for the working classes." Dangerfield could not have put it better.

© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999