Boris Johnson’s final act of madness? Making a 30-year-old a baroness

Investing Charlotte Owen with a life peerage is the icing on the cake for the ex-PM’s ‘dishonours list’, writes Tom Peck

It has been suggested that Johnson simply wanted to ruffle feathers by making Charlotte Owen the youngest life peer in British history (Parliament TV)

The pictures of 30-year-old Charlotte Owen, fully ermined up and being ceremonially invested into an almost unimaginably cushy job, quite literally for life, really do appear to have touched a nerve with the nation.

I think it is fair to say that few events, even in the last mad decade, have registered such a high reading on my WhatsApp barometer. Old friends, new friends and semi-friends have all been in touch to inform me of their anger at this constitutional outrage.

It’s prompted endless, sordid speculation and dissent – even among Boris Johnson’s friends and allies. Owen received the title when the No 1 Boris supporter, Nadine Dorries, did not.

It is arguable that anger at Owen – now Baroness Owen, of Alderley Edge – is misplaced. It is assumed, stated with rage even, that she is unworthy of a peerage. This, of course, is absolutely correct. But there is frankly nobody worthy of a peerage. In a democratic country, there is no contribution to society large enough that it should be rewarded with a lifetime role, making and scrutinising the laws, from which you cannot be removed.

Her appointment is, in short, no more or less outrageous than the rest of them. Clearly, though, she is not bringing as much to the party as others might. While there is some disagreement, though not very much, about the extent of her contribution to Johnson’s No 10 operation – which itself is unlikely to be remembered with great reverence – it is not unfair to suggest that she may have less to offer than the many former prime ministers, former chancellors and foreign secretaries she will now sit amongst.

But then again, while she might not have the business acumen of, say, her colleague Baroness Mone of Mayfair, it also seems unlikely that, at some future date, the government will be suing a firm linked to her for £122m over the supply of unusable PPE.

It is also disappointing that it should take the elevation of someone who seems comparatively normal to the House of Lords for the penny to drop on the kind of widespread scale it now has. The Lords has been rendered no more or less a democratic and constitutional outrage by Baroness Owen’s arrival.

Arguably the most enjoyable experiences of my near decade as a political sketchwriter have been the two occasions on which I have sat in the press gallery of the House of Lords for the state opening of parliament, next to my fellow sketchwriter Quentin Letts, now of The Times, as he offered what was essentially a guided tour of absolutely everyone in the room, accompanied by the long list of corruption scandals, sex scandals, or in some cases both corruption and sex scandals in which many of them have been involved, and despite which they can’t be got rid of.

What is intriguing about the Baroness Owen fallout is that it will be of great assistance to Keir Starmer if he hopes to keep his promise of abolishing the House of Lords entirely. Twenty-five years ago, Tony Blair tried to get rid of the hereditary peers – whose presence was a true disgrace – but doing so required the expenditure of so much political capital, and so much horse trading, that 92 of them were allowed to remain.

Every so often, one of these hereditary peers dies, and a new one has to be selected via a by-election in which only other hereditary peers may stand. There are usually three candidates, taken from a maximum pool of around eight. Whenever this occurs, London-based foreign correspondents of foreign newspapers write quaint pieces about the absurdity of it all. But these people still get jobs for life, and £300 in expenses per day, tax-free, with no requirement to produce receipts.

In 13 years of opposition, Labour has rarely bothered to talk tough on abolishing the Lords. There’s too much bare-knuckle politics involved in a cause that they know not enough people actually care about.

But that has changed. By appointing Charlotte Owen, a low-ranking No 10 special adviser who is mainly remembered as kind of meeter-greeter of visiting MPs, it has been suggested that Johnson simply wanted to ruffle feathers. To wind up whatever he might perceive as the establishment, as a kind of revenge for what he considers to have been his untimely downfall.

The trouble is, it’s worked. Large numbers of people with only a passing interest in politics now can’t wait for the Lords to be abolished, and these venal lackeys sent packing.

Yet again, whatever Johnson touches, he breaks. But there will be downsides, too. The House of Lords cannot be defended on any intellectual or constitutional level. But it can be on a practical level. For the most part, peers are human beings, and they are chastened by their awareness of the self-evident absurdity of what they do. But they are effective. They sit, until very late at night, large numbers of them also very late in years, and they do the tedious grunt-work of scrutinising government legislation.

There is a clear Tory majority in the House of Lords, but they still sent back Suella Braverman’s Illegal Migration Bill several times over, pointing out its considerable flaws, and its potential illegality under the European Convention on Human Rights. Of course, the bill passed in the end. There are only so many times it can be sent back. An elected second chamber would be a very different proposition.

The House of Lords is constantly filmed, but rarely televised. Its members do not speak in the hope of attention or fame. It is not, generally speaking, a siren for narcissists with little knowledge or ability beyond a longing for attention. The current crop of MPs is of mesmerically poor quality. An elected second chamber might be a democratic improvement. It may very well not be a legislative improvement.

But it now seems highly likely that we shall have it. Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge might have been given a job for life, but it seems unlikely that she will serve more than a few years, because she will be gone, like all of them, when Starmer abolishes them. It will just be a funny story for the grandkids, should they find a scarlet robe with an ermine collar in the bottom of a dressing-up box somewhere.

But in the meantime, she is no more shameless – or shameful – than the rest of them.