Who are you to talk, Baroness Spendthrift?

LiKe any exiting Prime minister, Boris Johnson is busy working on his resignation Honours list. The 252 Conservatives in the Upper House are outnumbered by 434 Labour, Lib Dem and crossbenchers, so Boris aims to drape the ermine over dozens of new shoulders to help address this imbalance. And his plans are annoying all the right people.

in the Guardian last week, Gordon Brown called it a ‘scandal’. The Labour peer and Lord Speaker John mcFall said it ‘undermines public confidence in our parliamentary system’.

But the noisiest of all in this squawking chorus has been Baroness D’Souza, one of mcFall’s predecessors as Speaker. ‘overstuffing the chamber... to achieve a majority of Tory-voting peers will not resolve the problem of poor and ill-thought-through legislation,’ she moans. ‘instead it will do the public a disservice.’

This from the woman who as Speaker insisted taxpayers should not ‘begrudge’ the £4,000 of their money she spent on flowers over five years to brighten up her parliamentary office. in justifying her extravagance, D’Souza argued that there should be more ‘respect’ for the ‘mystique’ of Westminster.

Then there was the £1,120 she spent taking a russian delegation to the ballet, including £230 to keep her chauffeur waiting outside for four hours. Let alone the £10,000 splurged on ceremonial clothes during her tenure.

So who is she to talk about ‘doing the public a disservice’?