Betty Boothroyd wanted to criticise prime ministerial abuse of patronage powers
Lady Boothroyd shattered more than 700 years of parliamentary tradition when she became the first woman to be elected speaker in April 1992.
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Your support makes all the difference.Baroness Betty Boothroyd intended to use her final speech in the House of Lords to criticise prime ministers for granting too many peerages to “those who are simply friends or have no other qualifications than having fat bank accounts”.
The former Commons speaker – the first and only woman to have been elected to the role – died in February last year, aged 93.
She had intended to make a valedictory speech in the Lords before retiring, but was too ill to deliver it.
Successive prime ministers have attached importance to their power of patronage; in my view this should be exercised far less generously than has tended to be the case in the recent past
However, Lady Boothroyd had agreed to the final draft, which her former secretary Sir Nicholas Bevan has arranged to be published.
In a text of the speech reported by the Daily Telegraph, she wrote: “Successive prime ministers have attached importance to their power of patronage; in my view this should be exercised far less generously than has tended to be the case in the recent past.
“Of course, prime ministers should be permitted to make appointments on leaving office but they should be limited in their proposals and they should not include those who are simply friends or have no other qualifications than having fat bank accounts from which they have bankrolled the party in power.”
Lady Boothroyd pushed for the Appointments Commission – which currently has the power only to advise on nominations to the House of Lords – to be elevated from its advisory role.
She wrote: “The commission’s powers should not simply be advisory but should be put on a statutory basis.
“Nobody should become a member of this House if a statutory Appointments Commission has reservations about their suitability.”
Lady Boothroyd also felt that the size of the Lords had become “absurd” at more than 800 members, writing she did not “see a role any longer for members who are here simply as a result of their heredity”.
She added: “Not only do we not need so many members to carry out our role, but our size positively militates against effectiveness and efficiency and is unnecessarily expensive.”
A former Labour MP, Lady Boothroyd shattered more than 700 years of parliamentary tradition when she became the first woman to be elected speaker in April 1992, staying on until October 2000.
She then entered the Lords as a crossbench peer in January 2001.