House of Horrors PAGES 16&17

QUENTIN LETTS, an unashamed traditionalist, used to defend the Lords. Today he couldn’t be more contemptuous of the cronies, crawlers and crooks in the Upper House — and says the time has come for a radical cull

ANY day now, David Cameron will send dozens of friends to the House of Lords to pass laws over us while they wallow in the privileges of the peerage. He will create these unelected legislators because, he will say, elected democracy demands it.

As the Mail disclosed yesterday, Mr Cameron has put forward a list of 40 names. It’s said he had originally wanted to appoint as many as 100, but Downing Street pooh-poohs suggestions that Whitehall mandarins forced him to reduce his ambitions.

Unless Mr Cameron has discovered some hidden stash of Nobel prize nominees, these 40 gilded fortunates will not be notable philosophers or nuclear scientists or apostles of jurisprudence.

When voters hear ‘peer of the realm’ they may imagine decorated war commanders, titans of industry or snowy-haired elders of our land. Dream on. The peers about to be announced will more likely include party donors, failed politicians and other flunkeys and chums whom Mr Cameron finds it politic to reward.

Add to that as many as 15 nominees of Nick Clegg — nearly double the number of Lib Dem MPs in the Commons — and perhaps five Labour appointees who helped Ed Miliband make such a mess of things.

These will be placemen and place-women; mates, gauche proteges, bland insiders who are ‘owed one’. It stinks.

The timing stinks, the principle (if there is one) stinks, the whole fandango stinks, stinks, stinks, and Mr Cameron stretches credulity with it — not to mention his own credibility by trying to defend it.

It is a crass decision that will push our parliamentary system to — maybe beyond — the brink of rupture, even though it might briefly buttress the Tories’ position in the Lords, where 226 Conservative peers are heavily outnumbered by a combination of 212 Labour and 101 Liberal Democrats peers.

It will also stain the Monarchy, which is the fount of the peerage, and will do the Conservative party far more damage than can be justified by any short-term political heft.

The current, bloated House of Lords is plainly a problem. It is outrageously skewed to the Europhile Left and, without more peers, important legislation could be delayed or jettisoned. But the solution should not be to add yet more sewage to an overflowing septic tank. It should be to drain that tank of some of its effluent.

NO DECISION regarding the Lords at present can be taken without regard to former Labour peer Lord Sewel, who has just given us a vintage sex scandal. His lordship was photographed snorting white powder off the breasts of a call girl via a rolled banknote. He was wearing an orange bra at the time, as one does.

The Sun newspaper’s exposé has blown a hole in Lord Justice Leveson’s strictures against the free Press. When you consider that Sewel was the man charged with imposing more rigorous standards of conduct in the Lords, you may recall what was said when Henry Kissinger won a peace prize: satire is dead.

Punchy journalism, thank goodness, is in better health. Perhaps we will now hear a little less preaching from the likes of Hugh Grant and Hacked Off about the perfidies of Fleet Street.

Sewel himself may soon be forgotten as little more than a sad pervert, but he is emblematic of a wider malaise, a deeply-ingrained attitude among the over-promoted deadbeats and professional politicians of the modern Leftist peerage.

The old, predominantly aristocratic House of Lords knew its place — i.e. that it was subservient to the elected Commons and should not push its luck when opposing Bills that had been promised in party manifestos. This new Lords has ideas far above its unelected station.

Before his ennoblement in 1996, sleazy Sewel was a politics lecturer at a provincial university. Thanks to the warped construct of the British Upper House, this mediocre figure became a minister in Tony Blair’s government and took it into his head that he was as much a grandee of our body politic as any hereditary peer of old. His arrogant behaviour with those tarts was only in keeping with the way he and Labour ( and Lib Dem) colleagues conducted themselves on the red benches.

In the last Parliament, they threw a tantrum and stopped the Government from making constituency boundaries more democratically fair. The plan was to cut the size of the Commons from 650 to 600 MPs, and to redraw the boundaries to make them the same size ‘on the simple principle of fairness with all votes being of equal worth’.

Though plainly more equitable, this would have given 20 extra seats to the Tories — so Labour and the Lib Dems blocked the changes. It was an act of blatant gerrymandering, typical of today’s partisan Lords.

The Westminster village and quangoland barely raised a protest. The BBC, which recently has been so eagerly promoting itself as a guardian of British decency, was profoundly relaxed, as were other liberal media outlets.

The boundary changes, you see, would have cost their friends in Labour a few seats in the Commons. Any idea of the