The following is the concluding chapter of the late Lord Sudeley's history of the House of Lords: Peers through the Mists of Time: Observations on the Origin and Evolution of the Old House of Lords (2018). Merlin Charles Sainthill Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley, FSA (17 June 1939 – 5 September 2022) was a longtime patron of the Monday Club and President of the Traditional Britain Group 

Looking to the Future

Previous History of Reform 

In order to outline how the movement began, and then stumbled, to put the composition of the House of Lords on some kind of elective, instead of hereditary basis I will need to recapitulate. 

The French was the first of the great class revolutions, and under its influence we have become acclimatised to the hereditary composition of the House of Lords being fully criticised by orthodox liberals and the left, and made into a party political issue. We need hardly say that, when parties originated during the reign of Charles II, thinking about the role of heredity in politics was viewed without any such modern prejudice. The inheritance alike of the Crown and a seat in the House of Lords was unquestioned. The matter over which Whigs and Tories fell into dispute was the religious issue of whether, because he was a Roman Catholic, James II should be permitted to inherit and, later, keep the throne; and it was the more progressive Whig peers in the House of Lords, who fired him to find another king. I have described how, in the reign of Queen Anne, the Tories needed to end the continuation, by the Whigs, of the war against Louis XIV and so, to ease the passage of the Treaty of Utrecht through a hereditarily composed House of Lords, they introduced their own handful of hereditary peers, called the Tory Dozen. In response, the Whig Lords endeavored, under their Peerage Bill of 1719, to make the House of Lords into a closed aristocratic corporation. In the other place, Walpole, who was their leader, talked this Bill out by use of the argument it would make the House of Lords too independent and powerful in relations to the other two principal elements in our constitution, the Crown and the House of Commons. Later on, in the eighteenth century, the Whigs could hardly be called democratic; their successful initiative for reform went no further than to reduce the power and influence of the Crown. 

It was during the nineteenth century that attitudes towards the hereditary composition of the House of Lords started to change through the enlargement of the franchise, which admitted the other classes into politics. Instead of remaining an exclusive stronghold of the aristocracy, the Whig, now to become the Liberal party, was infiltrated by a middle class Radical wing under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlain. In the year 1886, a further division amongst the Whigs arose, because their leaders Gladstone defected in favor of Irish Home Rule. Slowly, most of the old Whig aristocracy crossed over to the Tory Party. Thenceforward, whatever the outcome of a particular election, a hereditary House of Lords kept its large Conservative majority. To begin with, Liberal attempts to unsettle the old power of the House of Lords and its hereditary composition were a matter for private political initiative. The introduction of Bills to promote this radical cause was left to individual campaigning peers and MPs. Then after the Lords had rejected Lloyd George's Budget, it was a Liberal Government which, under the Parliament Act of 1911, curtailed the powers of the House of Lords, yet, at the same time, abandoned, to a nebulous and indefinite future, the more intractable question, of how to put the composition of the Upper House on a popular and democratic basis. 

Over how to eliminate the hereditary composition of the House of Lords the politicians carried on stumbling. Lord Bryce's conference of 1917-18, Lord Curzon's Cabinet Committee of 1921, Lord Cave's Cabinet Committee of 1925-7, and the Cabinet's Political Committee of 1933-5 may have sought to prejudice the position of the hereditaries. yet, every one of these attempts broke down, owing to an inability to propose any satisfactory alternatives. Under Attlee's administration a second Parliament Act cut the power of the House of Lords to delay legislation back to one year, yet, once again, to leave untouched its hereditary composition. At the same time, and under the Salisbury Convention, the Conservative hereditaries put themselves under the voluntary constraint of not voting against Labour legislation from the Commons. From 1958 the much deprecated hereditary composition of the House of Lords began to be compromised not through any well thought out and overall program of reform, but piecemeal and sideways, by legislation for the creation of Life Peers. Instead of welcoming such legislation, the Labour Party objected to it, because it left the hereditaries alone. 

Wilson in 1968

In 1968 Harold Wilson introduced a Bill to ensure, for any Government, a 10 per cent voting majority in the House of Lords by taking their voting rights away from the existing hereditaries, and ending all future succession to hereditary peerages. It was difficult to see how a hereditary could propose an amendment without being able to vote on it. Given the restraint under the Salisbury Convention, which the hereditaries had observed about voting, opposition to their continuance in the legislature had not practical foundation. All criticism was of a doctrinaire character, founded on class prejudice, inherited from the French Revolution, and defused in the House of Commons by Enoch Powell, who argued, that the hereditary composition of the House of Lords had a prescriptive basis. England is unique for the age and continuity of its institutions, which have evolved prescriptively to meet a particular need at a particular time; and, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke was right to condemn all reforms, motivated and governed by abstract principles. Wilson's Bill had the extra defect of being too long and complicated, 31 New Clauses and several new Schedules were tacked on to it. 259 Amendments were put down. By April 1969 the committee stage of the Bill had lasted for 87 hours and, yet, only the first five clauses of the Bill had been agreed to. Lords Reform had always been low on the political agenda. Wilson threw in the towel and withdrew the Bill to allow enough Parliamentary time for more important legislation. 

Stage I without Stage II

Thirty years later, in 1999, a Gallup Poll established that most of the electorate had no wish to remove the hereditaries without being told who might take their place. Retired Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, however, chose to take everything into his own hands by telling us, there could be no Stage II of reform of the House of Lords without Stage I of the elimination--he did not say liquidation--of the hereditaries. Having learnt its lesson in 1968, and following Callaghan's advice, the Government decided to keep everything simple by splitting reform into two stages. We were given Stage I of a short Bill just to evict the hereditaries. in the old days of a hereditary House of Lords it was the tradition to hear the Queen's Speech in the silence commanded by respect, and amendments and debates were won by argument. But when the Queen announced Stage I, the new Labour life peers breached the time-honoured tradition by greeting the words with an emotive shout of approval. From soon after the time of the first Parliament Act of 1911, under the influence of Hollywood, and in a way of no benefit to ourselves, the cinema has promoted and exploited our emotions. Evelyn Waugh disapproved: when in Hollywood, he presented a copy of Brideshead Revisited to a prolific script writer, having inscribed on its title page: 'To a fellow sufferer in Sodom'. 

Where was Stage II and what has happened to it?

Most Royal Commissions are ignored by Governments, because, in the first instance, they were created by them to shelve the awkward questions, which Governments do not wish or cannot answer. The Wakeham Commission appointed to advise on Stage II after--instead of before--Stage I had been enacted, and ever since its Report was published, our two Houses of Parliament have remained at loggerheads over whether we should have an Appointed or an Elected Upper Chamber. 

The Government Reversal of 2004. 

Events were to demonstrate how easy it could have been to avoid the farce of the enactment of Stage I without the promise of any Stage II to follow. In the end, under Stage I, 92 hereditaries were spared temporarily in order to exert pressure on the Government to fulfill its commitment to Stage II. When, by 2004, Stage II still had not been reached, the Government sought to remove these remaining hereditaries. By then, at last, the leadership of the Conservative Opposition in the House of Lords had become properly organized, and told the Government that, unless they could say, what Stage II might be, the peers would hold up all more important legislation. Under the exercise of this threat, the Government ran away. If, back in 1999, when all the hereditaries were still there, a properly organized leadership of the Conservative Opposition in the Lords had used the same threat, all of the hereditaries would have been spared. That is something, which was not allowed to happen, owing to the coming into being of what is called the Cranborne Deal to spare 92 of the hereditaries. 

The Formation of the Cranborne Deal

The parties to the Cranborne Deal were not fools. They made sure no trace should be found of how the Deal came to be formed. No record is left in any of the three most obvious places for it--the Cabinet Secretariat, the Department of Constitutional Affairs or the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Cranborne made some notes, but wrote to me to say, he intended to keep them exclusively for his own private use. For disclosure of what happened, we had to wait for the publication of the Diary of Blair's adviser Alistair Campbell, and here is his full story. 

Appreciating the strength of the position of the Conservative and hereditary peers to hold up his more important legislation, Blair realised that the only way to split opposition was the use of a dirty trick. He used his Lord Chancellor, Lord Irving of Lairg, to propose--not to Hague, who was the boss of his own party--but to Lord Cranborne, then leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, that 92 of the hereditaries should be spared to assist in Stage II, so that the rest would allow ourselves to be sent down the river. Overcome by his own vanity and conceit, Cranborne fell into Blair's little trap. Alistair Campbell reflected: 'The more I thought about it, the more shocked I was, that Cranborne consorted with us in the way he did. It was always going to end in tears for his own side'. 

Very sensibly, William Hague made up his mind to repudiate the Deal. Later on in 2004 he wrote to me a full letter to explain why. Cranborne was naïve, he said, in supposing that retaining some of the hereditaries would compel the Government to give proper consideration to Stage II. Blair, Hague noted, was interested, principally, in having not a stronger, but a weaker House of Lords. 

Alistair Campbell was deputed to make the Deal public at a press conference, held during Prime Minister's afternoon Question Time in the House of Commons. Beforehand, that morning, Cranborne told Hague about the Deal open at Prime Minister's Question Time in the Commons and rejected it. Meanwhile, at the same moment, Cranborne was persuading most of the peers, assembled in the Moses Room of the House of Lords, to accept the Deal by deceiving them into the belief that Deal was of his own making, and wallowed in the applause, which he received. If they did not accept it, he said, all of the hereditaries would have to go. When Hague surprised the meeting by his presence, the chair would not permit him to interrupt. But, once Cranborne had finished, Hague rose to his feet and fired him. Tragically, the sacking of Cranborne was never allowed to serve the good purpose, for which it had been intended. With Strathclyde as their new leader, and under the persuasion of Lord Cranborne, the whole of the Opposition Front Bench threatened to resign, if the Deal was not complied with. Hague's hands were completely tied. 

Skating on Thin Ice--the Questionable Legality of the Eviction of the Hereditaries

In giving us Stage I without Stage II the Government was unscrupulous. Often, it is said, it would have been less easy for the executive to have acted in this way, if we had been protected by a Written Constitution. In point of fact, with Statute and Common Law, we do have a Written Constitution to include Magna Carta in 1215, the Declaration and Bill of Rights of 1688-9, the Coronation Oath of 1689, and the Acts of Union, Succession and Settlement of 1701-7. For the sake of protecting our constitutional rights and principles, such a scattered body of texts of a miscellaneous character should be brought together and codified. 

Given that the Parliament Acts were concerned with the powers of the House of Lords, and not its composition, the eviction of most of the hereditaries, probably, was illegal, but do we have an independent judiciary to tell us so? Meant to be a triumph of the Glorious Revolution, the independence of the judiciary is questionable, where it crosses the line to become politicised. 

Aside from its probable illegality, nobody can doubt that the eviction of most of the hereditaries was brutal. They have had no douceur of the kind, given to retiring MPs or to all, who have worked in industry. 

Eviction of Judges 

After evicting most of the hereditaries from the House of Lords, Blair banished its judges to comply with the eighteenth century theory, drawn from Montesquieu, that a constitution should guarantee a perfect separation of the powers of the Judicature, Legislature and Executive. Montesquieu overlooked, how our constitution never fitted in fully with his own theory. Ministers, who form the Executive, sit in both Houses of Parliament, which form the Legislature. And, in his ancient office, the Lord Chancellor has combined all three of the separate powers of the Judicature, Legislature and Executive. Edward I, originally, put the judges in the House of Lords for the very sensible purpose that they should assist in the drafting of legislation, and let me give one good reason they should continue to exercise this role. 

When it enacts a statute, Parliament cannot be expected to anticipate very contingency, which may arise out of it. When such contingencies arise, it has to be left to some of the judges, Lord Denning being the best example, of bending and, indeed, making the law instead of confining themselves strictly to its interpretation. Great rows take place in the judiciary, when there are other judges, who have to point out, how unfair that is to the litigant, who understood the law as enacted by Parliament, and then has to pay all the costs, where the judge turns it upside down. This development cannot be helped, where judges are moved from their traditional role in Parliament to assist in the drafting of more perfect legislation. 

Eviction of Bishops

Despite the older forms of constitutional theory examined in this book--mediaeval corporativism and the eighteenth century theory of a Mixed Constitution--democracy has become today an entirely clean, i.e., infallible, word. Under that circumstance the point of view is expressed, sometimes, that Britain is the only major democracy, where the clergy are still represented in Parliament, so, in an entirely reformed House of Lords, the Bishops should have no reserved place. This is to ignore that the Church of England is not disestablished. It is the religion of our State. Bishops, who have sat in the House of Lords since Saxon times, must remain there to advise on all matters of conscience--we instance marriage, divorce and euthanasia as, probably, particularly relevant, but there is a moral dimension in many more human issues--and be in Parliament to answer, when Anglican doctrine endangered. Where the purpose of our Creeds has been to affirm the Dignity of Christ, the new servicess have secularized Christianity, and it is on that point the Book of Common Prayer must remain our yardstick and sheet anchor. The position, taken in the Alternative Service Book, that it was by the power of the Holy Spirit Christ became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, is not the same as the firm statement, given in the Prayer Book, that Christ became incarnate of the Virgin Mary. The Alternative Service Book allows the believer to suppose that Joseph, fortified by the Holy Spirit, had a part in the fatherhood of Christ, whilst the Prayer Book leaves no doubt about the function of the Holy Ghost as a male parent, so that the paternity of Christ is divine. Yet, after the promotion of the new liturgy under the Worship and Doctrine Measure of 1974, which questions the genealogy of Our Saviour, the Book of Common Prayer was on the way out. A line had to be drawn and held. That is what I achieved with the success of my Bill in the House of Lords in 1981 to uphold the old liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer is alive, still, instead of being confined to a museum. 

Undue Expansion of the House of Lords

Several times I have mentioned how, in the reign of Queen Anne, twelve Tory peers, called the Tory Dozen, were created to ensure acceptance of the Treaty of Utrecht. The threat to create more peers in just the same way was enough to secure the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, and then the Parliament Act of 1911. Today, whichever party wins the election, ensures the easy passage of its legislation by creating many more peers of its own political persuasion. The political will to put a stop to the continuous expansion of such a universe does not exist. Chief amongst criticisms of the House of Lords have become its overwhelming size and the new orientation, which it has brought towards party politics, greatly protracting all hours of business. 

Always, the House of Lords was there to take long views on questions of special interest, divorced from mainstream politics. Badly missing, today, are the occasional hereditary contributors, who used to speak so well on politically neutral topics--the old Duke of Devonshire on flat racing, which unites all classes, or the Scottish hereditaries, quiet voices from our neglected countryside, who knew more about forestry and agriculture than the Labour Front Bench. Once I introduced a debate on the export of historical manuscripts. Export promotes the trade in manuscripts, which breaks up original accumulations to be reformed into artificial collections. Much historical evidence disappears on the way. A manuscript may mean so much by itself, and twice as much, if kept and studied in its original accumulation. 

The Only Solution

The only two alternatives to the old hereditary House of Lords are an Elected or an Appointed Upper Chamber. Both alternatives are equally unsatisfactory. An elected House of Lords would result in gridlock. Ever too jealous of its own authority, the House of Commons would not wear an elected Upper Chamber in competition with itself. An Appointed Upper Chamber would leave the House to become the tool of the Executive, the power of which, as the senior branch of the Legislature, it has ever, since Magna Carta, been the historical role of the House of Lords to curb. 

The happy event of the Restoration happened by default. Once Humpty Dumpty had fallen off his wall, he could be put back again. Crown, bishops and hereditary peers were all put back to where they properly belonged, because nobody could think of anything better to take their place. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. The only way now to put an end to the lack of consensus amongst our politicians over whether we are to have an elected or appointed House of Lords is to re-instate the hereditaries. The clock never did have to move forward. Presented once with a clock, and challenged that he cannot bring back the past, Enoch Powell simply took it up from the table in front of him, and put it back by a simple turning of the hands. 

We may, however, need to wait for a long time, until well after I am gone, for posterity to see the reversal of our present constitutional vandalism. Vernon Bogdanor, who taught constitutional history to David Cameron at Oxford, is the first to observe, how low constitutional matters lie on any political agenda. Harold Wilson's attempt to modernise the House of Lords--and, my goodness, how much the word modernist got on everybody's nerves--was drowned under a Parliamentary Timetable, where other legislation was taken to be more important. The question remains: when will our politicians get round to restoring the hereditaries to their rightful place. 

To summarise, there has been a line running through my text, to say the House of Lords has been at its best with an unelected, largely hereditary composition. As such, it was well fitted to take long views, and provide the stability and independence, needed for a non-partisan approach to politics. Moreover, since the mists of time it has evolved into the best mechanism, under our constitutional checks and balances, to control and curb the power of the executive.