Leading the busybodies, that vain old lion Heseltine
ONE day, not far hence, we will look back at the 2017 House of Lords and be appalled and comically embarrassed.
How could a chamber of unelected busybodies, many of them booby-rejects of the electoral system, have been tolerated as they tried to obstruct the popular vote for Brexit?
We will gaze at yellowing snapshots of the likes of the 3rd Viscount Hailsham, the Lib Dems’ Lord Newby, oleaginous lawyer Lord Pannick and indignantly pinkcheeked diplomatic crawler Lord Hannay, and be amazed we did not pelt them with stinkbombs as they held out their little pinkies, sucked pompous gusts into their lungs, and insisted that the people had no idea what they were voting for with Brexit.
The European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill was again before the Upper House. This is the Bill giving Theresa May parliamentary approval for doing what the electorate already instructed her to do last June.
The current Lords, most of its members still stamping their booties in protest at that result, were debating amendments to a starkly simple Bill. Some wanted a second referendum. Others wanted Mrs May to be told what to do. Yet others wanted the Lords to be able to stop the PM coming back from Brussels with ‘no deal’.
Lord Hailsham – aka ‘Lord Moat’ since he listed moat-clearance in one of his expenses claims when he was an MP – screwed up his face like a constipated prune.
‘Only dictatorships do not allow people to change their minds,’ he said.
A weirdly archaic delivery. Was he trying to sound Churchillian? His voice so spittle-flecked and tacky-toothed, any dentist watching might have asked him to ‘rinse now, please’.
Lord Newby, a grey-shoed sort of specimen who never managed to become an MP and later worked as a spin doctor for Lib Dem leaders, wanted 16-year-olds to have a vote if there was a re-run of last summer’s plebiscite.
Lord Dykes, another Lib Dem Remainer, said we had
joined Nato and the United Nations without a referendum. He seemed to be suggesting Parliament should just announce it was going to rejoin the EU without asking the people.
‘It is the primordial duty of parliamentarians to restore the true, deep sovereignty of the British Parliament,’ harrumphed Dykes, one of the most gaseous bores on the Westminster estate.
‘Primordial.’ It is a word we often associate with dinosaurs and their swamps. Indeed.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, sore after a recent leg operation, said a second referendum would do nothing to heal divisions in the land.
The Archbishop of York made a speech but his accent was sadly impenetrable. Lord Forsyth (Con) was a hero for the Leave side. Overcoming boos from the packed Lib Dem benches, he said the Lords was trying ‘to grab the mace and challenge the authority of the Commons’. WE
heard from a shaky Lord Heseltine (Con), who indeed did once grab that mace. This was a rare attendance by the vain old lion who used the votes of parliamentary colleagues to topple Mrs Thatcher in 1990.
He did that usual Remainer thing of claiming he accepted the result of the referendum – and then said he was going to oppose it.
Such, he said, was the nature of parliamentary life. He said Oppositions always opposed the electorate’s wish.
This argument was later taken up by a low-wattage windbag, Lord (Adair) Turner – all hairdo and bluster. The referendum was ‘no more and no less legitimate than any general election’.
But this simply is not the case. The referendum was not a partypolitical contest for election to Parliament. It was a ‘yes or no’ vote, on a greater scale, on a matter which had divided the people from most of their politicians.
It was ultra- parliamentary, even uber-parliamentary.
It was needed because the occupants of the Parliament were no longer willing to defend the people’s sovereignty.
‘This noble House,’ was how Lord Cormack (a Tory Remainer) referred to it. No. Ignoble. And delusional.