My father, sharp as a tack at 83, and why Britain needs the wisdom of age

What do you think Baroness D’Souza, the house of Lords Speaker, has come up with as a response to the brouhaha caused by one of her deputies be-ing caught sniffing cocaine off the breasts of a couple of prostitutes?

She declared last week that something must be done ‘to address the current age profile of the house . . . We should ask again whether a retirement age should be applied’.

What has this got to do with the depreda-tions of Lord Sewel, the delinquent peer in question? this Scot — who until last week had been the Deputy Speaker in charge of ‘standards and conduct’ in the Lords — was no doddery old buffer. had he been, he couldn’t have managed such debauchery, even if he wanted to. John Buttifant Sewel is a mere 69: two years younger, in fact, than Frances D’Souza.

Yesterday, a ‘senior peer’ — perhaps D’Souza, perhaps not — was quoted as suggesting an Upper house retirement age of 80. She — or he — told a newspaper: ‘We cannot act as though the Sewel scandal never happened. We have to show the Lords is being reformed and more relevant … the plain fact is that if we want the Lords to be more effective we must reduce the average age.’

Talents

Really? Why are younger peers ‘ more relevant’? More relevant to what? and what makes this ‘senior peer’ think his/her elders are less ‘effective’? It is true that some of the oldest peers might be losing their marbles, with good medical reasons for retirement.

But old age alone is no reason for dis-qualification as a legislator. Indeed, it may very well be an advantage. as Cicero, perhaps the greatest ancient Roman orator and politician, observed: ‘there is assur-edly nothing dearer to a man than wisdom; and though age takes away all else, it undoubtedly brings us that.’

the very term ‘ Senate’ (of which the house of Lords is our version) is derived from senex, the Latin word for ‘old man’. the Italian Senate to this day has a minimum age of entry: its members have to be at least 40 years old.

the recent appointment of much younger ‘working life peers’ — to make the house allegedly more relevant — has not been an unqualified success. Lord Wei, whom David Cameron elevated to the peerage at the age of 33 in 2010, quit his official role in the house of Lords (promoting something called ‘the big society’) after less than a year. Not only did the anglo-Chinese businessman find the absence of any salary unbearable, given his need to support a young family: he had many other things he wanted to do, leaving little time to attend the Lords.

this in general, is the problem with appointing ambitious men and women in the prime of life: they are not prepared to sacrifice the time to play a significant role in the legislature.

John Browne, the then head of BP, was made Lord Browne of Madingley at the age of 53 in 2001: but his undoubted talents were completely absent from the house of Lords. Running Britain’s largest company (and being on the boards of numerous others) left no time at all for legislating.

I gather that Michelle Mone, the entre-preneur who founded the lingerie company Ultimo, is soon to be named a Conservative peer. She might well be ‘relevant’ — in the Lady D’Souza spirit — but how much time and intellectual effort will she devote to scrutinising and amending legislation?

this, after all, is the house of Lords’ only job. It is one it already does pretty well (and will perhaps do it still better if it implements Lord Bew’s recommendation that peers over 75 — but why only them? — may not claim daily attendance allow-ance unless they actually bother to speak). One of the reasons it does that job of legislative scrutiny well is precisely because it has men and women of considerable age and experience of law-making over dec-ades. a number of those are ex-Cabinet ministers, such as — I hereby declare a fil-ial interest — the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Lawson of Blaby.

My father is now aged 83. Physically he is not only much thinner than he was in his prime, but also somewhat frailer. Yet his mind is as sharp as ever — startlingly so, in fact. his memory is still a marvel — which means that when he challenges the Government on some badly drafted piece of legislation, he is able to recall other similar botched attempts in years gone by: something which members of the Commons with little sense of history (and even less in the way of personal experience) cannot do.

as his former colleague in Margaret thatcher’s Cabinets, the 84-year-old Lord tebbit, told the Mail on Sunday: ‘the advantage of having people over 80 in the Lords is that we can remember political mistakes of the past and help ensure they do not happen again.’

Perspective

thus last year Lord Barnett, shortly before his death at 91, was able to take part in a Lords debate about the so-called Barnett Formula — named after him — which he devised in 1978 and which awarded Scotland a higher per capita pub-lic spending settlement than the rest of the United Kingdom. he stood up to say that, with the benefit of almost 40 years’ hind-sight, what he had done was wrong. You don’t see that in the house of Commons.

there is another advantage in being a legislator of such age. When men and women are beyond careerism, they are also beyond caring what others might think of them. this can come across as rudeness in some old people, but it also means that they are immune to the fashionable idiocies of the moment.

Moreover, those now well into their 80s and even older (such as the wonderful 92-year-old Baroness trumpington) have a special perspective which will soon be lost. they are the generation which remembers World War II — with all it entailed, from food rationing to the loss of friends and siblings in the fighting. they are the last of what in america is respect-fully called ‘the greatest generation’.

this country, by contrast, would be show-ing shocking disrespect if it sacked them as a PR-driven response to the dissolute-ness of one (not very old) time-server. A PROPERTY tycoon has been successfully sued by the Ritz Club Casino for an unpaid debt of £2 million. Safa Abdulla al Geabury claimed the Ritz knew he was a gambling addict and should not have allowed him to play. We should not feel too sorry for al Geabury, however: with an estimated fortune of more than half-a-billion pounds, he can easily afford this loss. This cannot be said for an increasing number of British men and women who have become addicted to so-called Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, of which there are now well over 35,000 — concentrated in areas of the highest welfare dependency. Ten years ago, the Blair government allowed High Street bookmakers to provide this turbo-charged form of roulette. It has been wonderful for the bookies, but dreadful for the families of gambling addicts.