Consulting the register of interests for the House of Lords, you would be forgiven for confusing it with a secret list of British assets belonging to one of the world’s most shady states. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Qatar: Tick, tick, and tick – all are present and correct.
Let me explain. Members of the UK’s upper legislative house, the Lords as they are endearingly (or contemptibly depending on your political preference) called, are appointed to lifetime seats in which they have the right to vote on or amend any and all bills that make their way through parliament.
There are two main ways that you, upstanding citizen, can join their ermine-robed ranks. The most common is to be appointed by the PM who has in his gift the right to pack the chamber with as many loyalists as they like.
The other, ever-so-slightly fairer way, is to be chosen by the HofL Appointment Commission, introduced in 2000 to try drag this 11th-century institution kicking and screaming into the 19th. The idea behind this new process was to enrich our unelected chamber with luminaries from outside the Westminster bubble and dilute the power of career politicians who benefit from the well-established crony pipeline. Naturally in a chamber of 832, about two independent peers are created a year. Lovely.
Instead, we find ourselves in 2025 with a legislative body dominated by ex-MPs and media, business and party barons who shamelessly profit over their ennobled status. Philip Hammond, chancellor in the famously successful Theresa May administration, sits as a Lord and in the last two years was paid more than £800,000 for “consultancy” work for the governments of Bahrain, Kuwait, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. One can only imagine what that money bought them; I doubt it was simply a good conversation over a taxpayer-subsidised lunch on offer to all peers.
A prolific nominator of Lords was Boris Johnson who, in his three years as PM, created 87 peers. That’s right, 10 per cent of our upper house owes their political life to a Metropolitan Police-designated criminal. Take one such Lord, Baron Lebedev, of Hampton and of Siberia, who, if the Bond villain name wasn’t evident enough, is a Russian Tory donor and owner of the Evening Standard and son of a former KGB officer and oligarch. Since his appointment, he has attended the Lords twice.
The list of unproductive, distracted and profiteering peers is longer than this article allows me to explore but rest assured, there are many. I suppose then the question we have to ask ourselves is who does this actually benefit? If we assume that lawmakers exist to serve us and our interests, why do we so often have a creeping feeling that they don’t?
“House of Lords Chamber” by UK Parliament is licensed under CC BY 3.0.
