Why Keir Starmer will keep the House of Lords if he wins the election

Gordon Brown’s plan for an elected second chamber is doomed, writes John Rentoul

Starmer is reluctant to engage with fashionable constitutional reform (Getty)

The leader of the House of Lords is a government minister with a seat in the cabinet, but Margaret Jay resigned from the job in 2001 because Tony Blair had lost interest in further changes to the upper house of parliament.

She told our students at King’s College London this week that Blair, having expelled most of the hereditary peers, decided against a second stage of reform: “It was the main reason why I resigned. Not because I was in a temper about it, but because I thought if we’re not going to do Lords reform, I certainly don’t want to be leader of the Lords, which is just like being the headmistress and saying, ‘Please remember to bring your gym kit on Tuesday’.”

At the last of this year’s “Blair Years” class, which I teach with Dr Michelle Clement and Professor Jon Davis, she said: “If there wasn’t a major area of constitutional reform, which I thought there should be, then I thought that I can do some more interesting things.”