Grayling is stodgy as a Bavarian dumpling
THERE are few spectacles more mockable than the British Establishment discussing House of Lords reform. Pinkies are held at an angle, brows are furrowed, as our rulers bend every fibre of their beings to bypass principle and argue for personal or party advantage.
Sometime status- quo Herberts, after experiencing defeats in the Upper House, come over all iconoclastic. Former revolutionaries, now finding their own side in sway at the posh end of Parliament, discover the merits of keeping things as they are.
Ejected hereditaries, from their sullen castle keeps, mutter that the Lords should be scrapped. Life Peers, many once MPs, aver that it would be quite wrong to introduce a compulsory retirement or eviction regime from the Upper House; well, not until they have finished enjoying the facilities. One does find an awfully good calibre of egg mousse in their lordships’ subsidised dining room.
Westminster was at it again yesterday when the Government published the Strathclyde Review which has recommended that the Upper House have some of its powers tweaked/ reduced/ removed. David Cameron had promised to publish this short- turnaround review by the end of the parliamentary term.
Mr Cameron, more so George Osborne, was provoked to move against the Lords after that House rejected the Chancellor’s cuts to tax credits. Yesterday was the last day of that term, so the Prime Minister can reflect on another promise delivered. It being the last day, however, the Chamber was less than packed. How convenient.
You need a diploma in small print – more column inches than I have here in the entire year – to explain the context and import of everything proposed by Lord Strathclyde. How such a pleasingly convivial trencherman as Tom Strathclyde ever had the patience or willpower to become a constitutional expert is one of life’s insuperable mysteries. Rotund Tom might more easily have become a ballet dancer.
Chris Grayling, Leader of the Commons, lumbered to the despatch box around lunchtime to make a statement on the review. Mr Grayling could never be mistaken for a wood sprite. In rhetoric and repartee he is as stodgy as a Bavarian dumpling. all the more perfectly, his Labour opponent, Chris Bryant, is a sparkler – yesterday in a three-piece suit worthy of the late John Inman.
Mr Bryant, until just a few months ago hot for Lords reform, was aghast – appalled! – by the proposals. Labour has been having a ball in the Lords, you see, blocking numerous Tory Bills. ‘Government by fit of pique,’ was what he called it, alleg- ing that Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Grayling had ‘stamped their little feet’ after being frustrated on tax-credit cuts.
‘There’s a word for that,’ Mr Bryant said twice, recalling that the Conservatives were deploring things of which their own peers were in the past often guilty. He then invoked Benjamin Disraeli, saying this was ‘an organised hypocrisy’.
Eleanor Laing, Deputy Speaker, reacted like a pheasant nearly run over by a tooting Land Rover. a squawk of ‘order!’ and an order to Mr Bryant to withdraw the accusation of hypocrisy. Mr Bryant assembled a look of tweety-bow innocence to his lips and argued that the remark could not possibly have been out of order because it had been made by Mr Disraeli, who was a parliamentarian. Miss Laing retreated into her cave, grumbling.
Old Grayling, though mismatched against Mr Bryant, held up his end better than he has often done.
Scots nat MPs screeched for the Lords to be abolished. This may or may not be because they have no peers. alistair Carmichael (Lib Dem, Orkney & Shetland) was more relaxed about the undemocratic Chamber, perhaps because it has so many Lib Dems.
More significant, I suspect, were backbench Tory noises of mutiny about the Lords, Yeovil’s likeably uncomplicated Marcus Fysh calling the Upper House ‘a completely ridiculous anachronism – my constituents can’t work out why it has any power at all’. as Mr Fysh noted without enthusiasm, however, three of his constituents do: they are all Lib Dem peers.
Quentin Letts