'Everyone I owe favours to died 700 years ago,' says one peer as the House of Lords rejects reforming itself

As the House of Lords debated abolishing by-elections for hereditary peers, one such person pointed out that 'taxi drivers' and 'people on the underground' wouldn't stand for it

Should the House of Lords' 92 hereditary peers be allowed to disappear via natural causes? (Getty)

A myth commonly put about in these post-truth times is that the House of Lords is unelected. Rubbish. Fully 30 of the 909 members that place the Lords’ second only to the Chinese National People’s Congress on the World’s Largest Legislature leaderboard have each won glorious by-election victories to be there. It’s just that the right to stand, and indeed to vote in these by-elections comes via birthright.

Even the few people who know about this like to cast is as some lovingly arcane constitutional idiosyncrasy. In fact it is among parliament’s most modern customs.

When Tony Blair kicked out the hereditary peers in 1999, ninety-two were given permission to remain. Unfortunately, the demographics of the House of Lords being what it is, peers are statistically more likely to die than the population at large, and since that time 23 of them have done so (six have retired. One, Lord Bridges, was kicked out for non-attendance). These people need to be replaced. Fortunately, there remains a large pool of undead hereditary peers outside the House of Lords to choose from, who are then elected via by-election by their never knowingly under-ermined colleagues.

Occasionally, this causes embarrassment as only hereditary peers from the party in question are eligible to vote for who should replace them, meaning that, for example, when the Liberal Democrats held a by-election to replace Lord Avebury earlier this year, the electorate consisted solely of the party’s three existing hereditary peers.

It was for this reason that the House of Lords met on a Friday morning - itself an occasion as rare as a badger in daylight - to debate the ending of such by-elections, and to allow for the tradition of hereditary peerage slowly to come to an end via natural causes.

As christmas approaches, you will not be surprised to learn that are a number of turkeys were on hand to speak out against it. And not merely speak. More than sixty separate amendments to the bill had been proposed by a small handful of hereditaries. To vote on all of them, as they knew, would take many hours more than the time allotted to the bill, thus killing it off. But not before some erudite observations could be made by some of parliament’s most senior servants.

“When I discuss this with people,” Viscount Trenchard noted, “with taxi drivers, people in shops, people on the Underground—I find that the presence of the hereditaries in this House is seen as a continuation of a great tradition. It is a link with history.”

So that secret underground line exclusively for the ruling classes is real then.

Viscount Trenchard is a mere 65 years old so the matter of replacing him is not a pressing urgency. But when the sad occasion does arise, entering by default the pool of available candidates will be his son and heir, ALexander Trenchard, who was jailed in 2011 for defrauding Tesco to the tune of £355,000 for a music festival he was attempting to start in his family back garden.

So that secret underground line exclusively for the ruling classes is real then. Earlier, Lord Anderson had called the hereditary by-election system ‘absurd. Viscount Trenchard had an answer. “They are no more absurd than any other elections in many bodies around the country,” he said. “Very often a small group of people decides between one, two or several candidates. Indeed, I think Her Majesty the Queen still chooses between two candidates for the position of Archbishop of York or Canterbury. I am not sure whether that system still exists but it certainly did so.”

He is in essence correct about this. And moreover, both the Archbishops of York and Canterbury are also automatically elevated to the House of Lords. What more certain way could there be to disprove the notion that a by-election with three hereditary voters is absurd than to remind that other such elections have only one - the Queen?

But other peers were more persuasive in their arguments. At least these thirty people had been been through some sort of election at all. The Conservative non-hereditary peer, Lord True, was not the only one to point out that, ‘I’m here on the vote of one person, by patronage.’

“It seems to me that the best chance of getting into this House in future will be to become an MP,” said the Earl of Caithness. “You could possibly increase your chances if you change party as an MP. I have a friend in Scotland who changed from the Conservative Party to the SDP-Liberal party; he was promised a peerage. He did not get it so he changed to the Labour Party. He was promised a peerage, but he did not get it. He is disillusioned with politics now.”

Inevitably, the bill was delayed, but not before Lord Cromwell,could summarise it most succinctly of all. “The people owed favours to by some life Peers are not very far from where we sit this morning,” he said. “All the people I owe favours to died about 700 years ago.”