Moving the House of Lords has nothing to do with serving the north – it’s a threat to peers

The subtext seems to scream ‘screw with us by blocking our legislation, you daft old fossils, and we’ll condemn you and your ermine-lined zimmers to countless 400-mile round trips to York’

Brave New World is universally regarded as one of the classics of dystopian fiction, but for the life of me, I’ve never understood why.

Admittedly, the government in Aldous Huxley’s novel is no beacon of benign democracy. But it never mooted transferring the House of Lords to York (or Birmingham, or one of Saturn’s rings; the details remain sketchy). Best of all, if not for the best of reasons, it made the oblivion drug soma freely available to citizens.

If someone offered you a dose that would put you into a coma for four and a bit years, or however long it takes to rid Downing Street of the Johnson-Cummings Axis powers, you would, in the parlance of the football pundit, rip their arm off.