Say what you like about Charlotte Owen, Boris Johnson’s pet baroness, but for an accepted nonentity she is doing valuable work. Valuable, that is, to hereditary peers. It is the young baroness’s achievement, with the help of some similarly resented colleagues, to make the hereditaries look – almost – legit.
Now that Labour has returned to the task, bungled by Tony Blair, of abolishing hereditary peers in the House of Lords, the endangered peers have in turn resumed their primary activity of defending the indefensible: themselves. The ritual arguments are as desperate as ever. Already, half-forgotten apparitions like the 2nd Baron Strathclyde, whose title goes back all the way to 1955, are working themselves up, demanding to know why, basically, elected politicians didn’t ask permission before tinkering with privileges 92 men are still able to acquire due to being, as David Lloyd George once put it, “first of the litter. You would not choose a spaniel on these principles”.
