Exactly 100 years ago, with his government embroiled in scandal after scandal that included the sale of peerages, the then prime minister, David Lloyd George, was brought down by Conservative backbench MPs. Now, with the current prime minister also having been unceremoniously dispatched by Conservative backbenchers, his attempt in his final weeks to create multiple new peerages is once again placing the House of Lords at the centre of scandal.
A confidential document prepared by CT Group, the influential lobbying firm run by Lynton Crosby which advises Boris Johnson, and which I have seen, makes no bones about the defenestrated prime minister’s aim to pack the House of Lords. The document proposes that Johnson ride roughshod over every convention and standard of propriety in an effort to secure political nominees who will vote for the Tory government, especially its bill to disown the international treaty it has itself signed over Northern Ireland.
This draft plan to add 39 to 50 new Tory peers includes an extraordinary requirement that each new peer sign away their right to make their own judgment on legislation that comes before them. They have to give, the paper says, a written undertaking to attend and vote with the government.
The plan also legitimises straightforward bribery. In a throwback to the Old Corruption that was a feature of 19th-century Tory Britain, compliant lords will be “rewarded” with lucrative special envoy positions, and, while those who fail to attend votes will be placed on a “name and shame” list, CBEs and additional titles will be handed out, responding to what is an apparently insatiable demand for the already ennobled to be showered with additional honours on top of their peerages.
But the cynicism of the Crosby firm’s paper plumbs new depths when outlining what it calls “useful cover from any media backlash”. The perpetrators of this coup will claim, wholly falsely, that their real aim is to redress the balance between the south-east, which has the largest number of peers, and the north of England, Scotland and Wales, which are underrepresented, as though the award of peerages is a genuine form of levelling up.
The paper also suggests that the “perfect excuse” to flood the House of Lords with Johnson’s cronies will be the Lords’ doubts about a hard Brexit, “on the grounds that the ‘People’s Brexit’ can only be delivered by such a wedge of new Tories”. This will, it says, provide an “excellent cover” for railroading the nominations. The report is also useful cover for Crosby, whose firm has had close links with the tobacco industry, when it states that the creation of Tory peers is also justified by the refusal so far of the Lords to vote for a “laissez-faire attitude to tobacco manufacturers and importers”.
The media, according to the Crosby firm’s paper, can be easily blindsided by the appointment of a few controversial figures or well-known celebrities, which will distract journalists away from the real issue, which is the sheer scale of the gerrymandering.
One of the claims the House of Lords makes for its existence is that it is a revising chamber, willing to take an independent view and bringing in expertise on a non-party basis; but the Crosby firm’s plot would negate the nomination of such independent peers.
Opinion polls show this plan would be opposed by the public: 71% of Britons back overhauling the House of Lords and opposition to the current Lords is as strongly felt among Conservative as Labour voters, among remainers as well as leavers and in the south as well as the north. Support for the second chamber has declined to as low as 12% of the public; and with more than half of the British public thinking the House of Lords does not work, the solution is to reform the Lords, not reinforce its unrepresentativeness.
The Crosby firm’s paper inadvertently makes the case for this radical overhaul. It is “not clear” why most of the members of the Lords were appointed, it says. The Tory ministers in the Lords are “inadequate” with “little to offer”. The leader of the Lords is “a poor political manager”. All of which raises profound questions about what the current appointments system has thrown up and calls into question the unfettered patronage of the prime minister who alone can recommend appointments to the Queen.
Past prime ministers have realised that there have to be limits to the use of this power, and Tony Blair and I declined to submit the traditional resignation honours list, the abuse of which has undermined the reputation of a number of past prime ministers.
There are, of course, many honourable, dedicated and diligent members of the House of Lords, who should be praised for doing their best for the country and whose contributions to public life make the case for a reformed second chamber.
But Johnson’s latest attempt to manipulate the Lords’ system is the culmination of years of constitutional vandalism, during which he and his predecessors have been shameless in their appointment of Conservative party donors, rewarding them for what they did to advance a narrow party interest, not the wider public interest.
Since 2010, successive prime ministers have elevated nine of the party’s former treasurers, each of whom has donated at least £3m to the party prior to their nomination. This has included the Johnson cheerleader Peter Cruddas, whose nomination Johnson pushed through even after he was deemed unsuitable by the independent House of Lords Appointments Commission. “Once you pay your £3m, you get your peerage,” one former Conservative party chair said.
Money talks, and nowhere more so than in the Lords. Twenty-two of the party’s biggest donors – who together have donated £54m to the Conservatives – have been made lords since 2010. Not only do these 22 have peerages but, as one leading Tory donor, Mohamed Amersi, confirmed this week when talking of “access capitalism”, large cash donations give “a privileged few unrivalled access to decision-makers”, adding up to “as I fear … an implied or expressed quid pro quo” that is “undermining our democracy”. He proposes “a new source of funding that would undermine the current system of the privileged few gaining access”. Indeed the party’s chief fundraiser and co-chair, Ben Elliot, he says, has taken “access capitalism to a new level within the party” without any proper transparency, which is why he is fittingly known as Mr Access All Areas. And we now know of investigations involving members of the House of Lords into the fast-tracking of lucrative Covid contracts.
I tried in 2008 to press ahead with a major reform of the Lords but we were defeated – as previous attempts have been – by the combined weight of peers who favour no reform at all, those who found a reason to disagree with the specifics of our proposed reform and those who claim the only acceptable reform is total abolition. Now it is time to flush out who really wants change and who does not. The preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act stated that the power of the House of Lords was no more than an interim solution until a second chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis could be brought into operation. More than a century on, the modern constitution envisaged then still eludes us.
The abolition of the current House of Lords was one of the 10 commitments Keir Starmer made when assuming the Labour party leadership. Now Boris Johnson and Lynton Crosby have handed him the strongest possible case for long overdue reform.
Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
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