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.”

She said there was a lesson from this recent history for Keir Starmer, which is that a Labour government should not get “bogged down” in the kind of “root and branch” reform proposed by Gordon Brown, who in December published a plan to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected Assembly of the Nations and Regions.

She suggested that Starmer should instead pick up where she left off, with her plan to cut the numbers in the Lords by imposing a term limit of 15 years.

She thought that would be “fairer” than an age limit of, say, 70, “because people vary so much” and because “a lot of very good people don’t come in to the Lords until they’re in their later sixties simply because they’ve been doing high-level jobs in important professions before – they still offer a very good contribution”.

She said that simple change “would make a huge difference; it would get rid of a large number of people – I don’t mean because they’re bad, but it would just clear out the numbers, and I think would be a useful incentive for the way the place worked”.

I suspect that Starmer already knows that limited reform such as this, possibly combined with getting rid of the remaining 92 hereditary peers, would be prudent. He “welcomed” Brown’s plan with all the enthusiasm of someone opening the door to a party of unexpected house guests.

The plan is now subject to “consultation”, and I understand that Starmer has been warned by many Labour peers – including David Blunkett, who also expressed his scepticism at King’s recently – of the danger of a Labour government having its entire legislative programme blocked in the Lords for years.

This is likely to be a particular problem if Starmer leads a minority government in a hung parliament. The voters simply would not understand a new government devoting time and energy to trench warfare with the Lords when there are pressing issues of the cost of living, the NHS and crime to attend to.

What Starmer should have said to Brown was: “If it was so important, why didn’t you do it when you were prime minister?”

Starmer’s reluctance to engage with fashionable constitutional reform generally seems to suggest that he is more likely to complete Baroness Jay’s unfinished business than Brown’s. He has so far avoided any commitment to proportional representation – not even a promise of a referendum on the subject of the kind that Blair made but didn’t keep. However much Labour activists care about voting reform and constitutional meddling now, these things are never a priority in government.

Baroness Jay’s thoughts about Lords reform were only a small part of her contribution to our class, which covered her role as a health minister and as women’s minister as well, and her views of Blair’s “amiable” style of leadership with a “very steely centre”.

She said: “My general point, and I do want to make this very firmly, is that the Blair government was a serious government. People were serious. They took it seriously. It was something which mattered.

“One of the things which has been most damaging to this country, I don’t just mean to this government, but to this country, has been the last few years, when the whole world has begun to laugh at our systems of government. I really do believe that Boris Johnson in particular has undermined the whole concept of seriousness as an approach by a prime minister, which was absolutely not true of Tony Blair at his most relaxed, at his most casual, or of any of the people who worked for him.”

But she told our students that in some ways it was a good thing that she left Blair’s government when she did, because she was “completely opposed to the Iraq war”. She said: “I’m not sure I’d have had the balls to resign. I was glad that I was on the sidelines.”

Even so, she said it made her “sad” that so many of the students felt that the war subtracted from the achievements of the Blair government: “I really am an unabashed Blairite, and I do think that Tony Blair was a very good prime minister and a good leader.”