Time for a quick quiz. What links Nadine Dorries, lockdown-rule-flouting London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey and David Ross, a Tory donor embroiled in a scandal after funding a prime ministerial holiday to Mustique. If you answered, “They are all rumoured to appear on Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list,” give yourself ten points.
The UK’s resignation honours are one of many political peculiarities across the world, a bit like presidential pardons in the US, the logic of which falls apart under any serious scrutiny. They have been a sporadic feature of British political life since 1895.
These lists are a product of the UK having an appointed, as opposed to elected, second chamber. Someone has to choose who sits in the House of Lords and that someone is often the prime minister of the day. It has become convention that upon leaving office, the prime minister draws up a list of people to send to the Lords. And alongside this convention has emerged another: that they choose political allies, Downing Street staff and people to whom they owe favours, for one reason or another.
