What really goes on inside the House of Lords

Bloated seat of privilege or dynamic body of expertise?

There can’t be many peers who spent the night before their introduction to the House of Lords at a Premier Inn, but John Bird – now Baron Bird of Notting Hill – was sworn in 15 months ago having stayed in one of the hotel’s family rooms with his wife and children, before crossing London by bus and Tube to don his ermine robe. The 71-year-old founder of

– the magazine sold by the homeless – is not usually lacking in confidence, but taking the oath of allegiance in his finery was daunting: “When I walked in I felt a bit like the accused – as if I was young again and walking into the old Court of London Sessions to be judged…”

His maiden speech took fellow peers back to that misspent youth. “Someone asked how did I get into the House of Lords and I said: ‘By lying, cheating and stealing,’ ” he began, to shocked laughter. “But if I had not gone through that… I would never have been able to get out and learn to read and write in a boys’ prison at the age of 16.” He spoke of his childhood in orphanages, and how, in his youth, he sometimes slept on a bench in the park next to the Lords and spent a few weeks employed in its kitchens, washing up.

Now, as a “people’s peer” – one of a number of non-party-political peers appointed by a commission established to change the Upper House’s aristos-in-ermine image – he scrutinises legislation from ‘the other place” (the House of Commons) and eats lunch at the Lords’ long table which, one peer suggests mischievously, “is the place from which the country is really governed”.

The long table, the ermine robes, lives in a grand mansion in Scotland, with a silver staircase copied from Versailles. These days, however, the second chamber is packed with a unique concentration of expertise: former surgeons, senior soldiers, teachers, leading scientists, successful businessmen and social reformers.

They’ll collect up to £300 a day, of course, just for turning up. Baroness D’Souza (scientist and former Lord Speaker Frances D’Souza) set feathers flying last week when she claimed that some took the money but did nothing to earn it. She recalled an occasion when she saw one “who shall be utterly nameless” draw up in a taxi and run to the peers’ entrance, “presumably to show that he’d attended… I think that we have lost the sense of honour that used to pertain.”

Let’s hope she doesn’t run into Lord Dobbs, who as Michael Dobbs was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher and wrote the classic political thriller

“I was really upset by Frances D’Souza’s comments,” he says. “I think they’re inaccurate, they’re wrong, they’re wrong, they’re wrong. If that were the House of Lords then I would not wish to be part of it. Everybody can find individuals in any institution who don’t play the game.”