Lords a leaping up to York?

The Lords are going to York. Well, a nice pensioners’ adventure never hurt anyone, did it? And of course, it might not happen. Someone might point out to the prime minister and his blue-sky thinkers that connecting with the electorate outside the seat of government is all very well but it doesn’t quite cut the mustard when the people you are sending to do that are actually, er, unelected.

It smacks of embedding them with the commonality to learn its mysterious ways, like some kind of tweed-clad Harun al-rashid sallying forth into the souks of Baghdad in the Arabian Nights to check up on the chavs. Except they won’t be in disguise, of course. It would take more imagination than the combined intellectual might of parliament can muster to come up with something that would do that, although that obviously hasn’t stopped someone, somewhere, entertaining somewhat wacky notions of what will appease the populace in these grim northern fastnesses.

Now, the House of Lords has endeared itself to many in recent times by poking its nose into government business and its collective finger into the eye of those attempting to bulldoze legislation on to the statute book without proper scrutiny. Only this week, four defeats (and counting) over Brexit bills. Although it should be pointed out that the government’s immediate response that it is going to overturn the Lords’ amendments doesn’t actually tally that well with the supposed significance of the second house touching base with the public. If you’re not going to take any notice of what it says, what’s the point in putting it out there in the first place? Beats me, guv.

Maybe it goes along the lines of the historic royal progresses of the past, when Good Queen Bess stravaiged around the stately homes of the nation, bankrupting her hosts and causing sedan chair traffic jams along what was probably the 16th Century equivalent of the route shortly not to be followed by HS2. I can see a burgeoning market in little plaques along the lines of “Queen Elizabeth slept here”, a highly appropriate precedent for the current upper house, if sneaky TV screengrabs of snoring aristocrats dribbling on to the ermine are anything to go by.

In keeping with current practice, however, trickling down from the royal family on to those of us nestling cosily beneath, it would seem that nobody told the worthy burghers of York about the signal honour about to be conferred on their modest enclave of opinionated northern contrarians. The news, so we are told, “took city leaders by surprise”. Which is quite understandable when you think that the newly elected government, committed to fooling (oops, sorry!) supporting all of the nation, all of the time, is now considering not even extending the aforementioned HS2 much beyond Birmingham.

Their lordships, obviously, will be travelling by road. I foresee a Brexit business opportunity and predict a nice new line in coach party travel and charabanc outings from Stagecoach, complete with sing-alongs and nice cups of tea, with a nod to their eventual destination the shape of a barm cake or a wodge of Yorkshire parkin.

I suppose York will, with typical northern stoicism and phlegm, take it in its clog-clad stride. Just as long as the exodus of peers from London doesn’t actually mean that the government intends to send the existing Duke of York actually to live there, they can probably put up with more or less anything.

I have a vague recollection that a Council of the North was created in 1472 by King Edward IV to “administer justice and to improve government control and economic prosperity to the benefit of all of Northern England”.

It seems slightly churlish to point out that the first Lord President of this august body was the king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester who subsequently went down in history as Richard III, possibly the only British royal ever to get worse press than the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Although one has to admit that allegedly murdering your nephews and burying them under a staircase in the Tower of London is a somewhat more drastic way of getting rid of pesky and unwanted relatives than merely stripping them of their HRHS and allowing them to exile themselves to a post-colonial life of “working to become financially independent” and Disney voice-overing.

Either that, or the prime minister is using it as a cunning ruse to get shot of ex-speaker and general thorn-inside-in-chief, John Bercow. He may not have been elevated to the peerage by his own party but it would appear he is now being touted as the future Baron Bercow of Remain-shire by no less a figure than one J Corbyn Esq.

Which is as nice a way of tying off a few irritating loose ends, short of bringing back hanging, as I have ever come across. And they say people don’t reach across party lines any more…

Picture: PA. The House of Lords meets in the Palace of Westminster in London – for now. Asked whether the government was planning to move the House of Lords to York, Conservative Party chairman James Cleverly said: “We might.”