38 Lords (and Ladies) A-leaping: new peers announced

Downing Street released the long-expected list of new members of the House of Lords as the Labour Party seeks to even the party balance

I’m sure it is unacceptably cynical to say that the prime minister delayed the announcement of 38 new life peers until the day after Parliament had adjourned for Christmas, even though the media was briefed that the list would appear on Thursday and then, after patient waiting, it… did not. In any event, now we know who has an early gift from Father Christmas. There are 30 new Labour peers, six Conservatives and two Liberal Democrats, to increase the government’s strength in the House of Lords where, although no party has an overall majority, the Conservatives have the greatest number of peers. Ahead of the new appointments, the composition of the upper house is as follows:

Conservatives: 271
Labour: 185
Crossbenchers: 184
Liberal Democrats: 78
Non-affiliated: 43
Lords Spiritual: 25
Democratic Unionist Party: 6
Ulster Unionist Party: 3
Green Party of England and Wales: 2
Plaid Cymru: 2
Conservative Independent: 1
Lord Speaker: 1

The new additions will bring the Labour Party closer to the Conservatives, but it has to be read in conjunction with the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill which is currently before Parliament. It will remove the remaining 92 excepted hereditary peers, just under half of whom are Conservative but only four Labour, so if we put the two measures together, the main parties after the bill becomes law will be as follows:

Conservatives: 232
Labour: 211
Liberal Democrats: 76

It had long been expected that Sir Keir Starmer would create a substantial number of peers at an early stage, just as the last prime minister of a different party to take office, David Cameron, had done in May 2010: a combination of new working peers and those included in the Dissolution Honours saw 29 Labour peers, 16 Conservatives, nine Liberal Democrat, one DUP and one crossbencher appointed. In November 2010, another new tranche was announced, comprising 28 Conservatives and 15 Liberal Democrats for the coalition government, 10 Labour peers and one Plaid Cymru.

I have no intention of mounting a high horse about the number of peers named this week. No recent prime minister can claim to have practised parsimony when it comes to peerage creations: Sir Tony Blair created 374, Gordon Brown 34, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton 245, Baroness May of Maidenhead 43, Boris Johnson 87, Liz Truss 29 and Rishi Sunak 51, though Sunak’s resignation honours are yet to be announced. Clearly the highest rate of those was Truss, who nominated 29 peers and was only Prime Minister for 49 days. May and Brown stand out for their restraint (characteristically). But so long as we have a largely appointed House of Lords with peers generally remaining in the House for life, this is part and parcel of the institution.

It is more justifiable to point to the gap between Starmer’s expressed intentions and his actions. I wrote about reform of the House of Lords in September, and pointed out that the Prime Minister has gradually downgraded, or at least deprioritised, his plans for changing the composition of Parliament, starting with a scheme to abolish the House of Lords entirely and replace it with an elected Assembly of the Nations and Regions (“ANR” as post-nominal letters?). Now the only concrete change underway is the removal of the excepted hereditary peers, after which the government will hold a public consultation on further reform. As I have said before, my strong suspicion is that the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill will pass, the Lords will become for the first time in its history a wholly appointed chamber, and the government will lose any enthusiasm for further change. An entirely appointed house, with its preponderance of Conservatives being gradually chipped away by Labour nominees, will suit ministers well.

So there is a slightly unappetising cynicism about the government’s approach to the House of Lords: it professes to want reform, but until that is achieved it will fully and unapologetically make use of the current system for its own advantage. It is logical and politically astute, and it may be the course of action any leader would take, but it does not sparkle with virtuous lustre.

Still, we are where we are, as the saying has it. The new peers are a mixture of predictable party workhorses, rewards for services rendered and one or two genuinely interesting and unexpected choices. The most routine names are the former Members of Parliament who stood down or were defeated at the general election: for Labour, Kevin Brennan, Lyn Brown, Thangam Debonnaire, Julie Elliott and Steve McCabe were all in the Commons until this year, while Margaret Curran was defeated in 2015 and Phil Wilson lost his seat in 2019.

The Conservative nominees include two casualties of the general election, Dame Thérèse Coffey, who was, it is easy to forget, Deputy Prime Minister under Liz Truss, and Rachel Maclean, former Minister of State for Housing and Planning who chaired Kemi Badenoch’s leadership campaign and was recently appointed as the Conservative Party’s Director of Strategy.

One more former MP on the list is a more interesting case. Luciana Berger was elected as Labour Member of Parliament for Liverpool Wavertree in 2010, a week before her 29th birthday. She was regarded as a high-flyer and joined the Opposition front bench within a few months, speaking on climate change (2010-13) and public health (2013-15). After the 2015 general election Jeremy Corbyn appointed her to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Minister for Mental Health, but she was ideologically out of kilter with his leadership and resigned in June 2016.

Berger’s criticisms of Corbyn and a rising level of antisemitic abuse estranged her further from Labour, and in February 2019 she joined a number of Conservative and Labour MPs in resigning from their parties to form a centrist, pro-European alliance initially known as The Independent Group and then as Change UK—The Independent Group. Like many centrist projects before it, Change UK struggled for traction, and Berger left in June 2019 to sit solely as an independent, then in September joined the Liberal Democrats. That December, she contested Finchley and Golders Green for the party but, despite an enormous swing in her favour and the collapse of the Labour vote, she came in 6,562 votes behind the incumbent Conservative Mike Freer.

After leaving the House of Commons, Berger took a senior position at public relations consultancy Edelman UK, then in October 2022 was appointed CEO of lobbying and communications firm iNHouse. In February 2023, after Sir Keir Starmer made a public apology for the mood of antisemitism which had plagued the Corbyn years, she rejoined the Labour Party at the leader’s specific request, and earlier this year led a review of mental health policy for the party. Does her peerage indicate a return to frontline politics? She has previously left the door open to such a move, and is only 43 years old: it seems wholly plausible.

There are a few other interesting inclusions among the Labour nominees. Anji Hunter was a childhood friend of Tony Blair who served as Director of Government Relations in 10 Downing Street from 1997 to 2001 before moving to the private sector to work for BP and Anglo American then Edelman UK, where she is still a senior adviser. In 2006 she married veteran Sky News journalist Adam Boulton.

Another figure from Labour’s past is Wendy Alexander, former MSP for Paisley North and briefly (2007-08) Leader of the Scottish Labour Party. She was a special adviser to Donald Dewar at the Scottish Office in 1997-98 and deeply involved in the creation of the Scottish Parliament and the devolved administration, and went on to be a minister in the Scottish Executive under Dewar and his successor as First Minister of Scotland, Jack McConnell. Alexander resigned in 2002, rejoined the Labour front bench when it went into opposition in May 2007 then succeeded McConnell unopposed as Labour leader in September that year, but struggled to make an impact. When a scandal built over her acceptance of an improper donation for her leadership campaign, she stood down in June 2008, and left the Scottish Parliament in May 2011. She was an associate dean at the London Business School before becoming Vice-Principal (International) at the University of Dundee (from which post she resigned last month) and has served on a number of advisory bodies on education and investment. Her younger brother is Douglas Alexander, now Minister for Trade Policy and Economic Security, who represented Paisley South in the House of Commons while she was MSP for Paisley North.

The inclusion of Sue Gray, Downing Street Chief of Staff from July to October before her enforced resignation, was widely anticipated. When she left her post, Starmer appointed her as his “envoy to the nations and regions” (a catch-all term which includes the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and local government in England), but eyebrows were raised when she immediately took leave. Last month it was announced that she would not take up the position after all (prompted, some said, by the imminent withdrawal of the offer by the Prime Minister). There has been some criticism of Gray’s appointment as somehow rewarding failure, while other have protested high-mindedly that she had enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the civil service before joining Starmer’s office in 2023.

On that last point, let us be honest: Gray’s civil service career was indeed long—more than 40 years in the end—and she held several important and senior posts, retiring as a second permanent secretary. But it takes nothing away from that to observe that it is not a level of Whitehall seniority which on its own would have been rewarded with a peerage, which tend only to be given to former cabinet secretaries and permanent secretaries to HM Treasury and the Foreign Office. Nor is it any slur on Gray’s record to acknowledge that she has been given a peerage on the strength of her work for Starmer; it is a list of political peers and she is as deserving as many other on this week’s list. What is not clear is whether her elevation is a golden handshake or an attempt to find a new role to harness her skills and experience. I suspect it is the former, and Starmer is drawing a line under what has been, it has to be said, a staggeringly unsuccessful partnership in terms of results and adverse publicity; but predictions are a fool’s game.

Two of Kemi Badenoch’s nominations are being scrutinised for deeper meaning. Professor Nigel Biggar is an Oxford theologian who gained publicity and, in some eyes, notoriety last year when he published Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, an attempt, as he saw it, to reassess the legacy of the British Empire in a dispassionate and contextual way. People will have their own views on the wider debate—I’ve started but not finished Colonialism and have found it considered and painstaking, though I think Biggar has a tiny glimmer of mischief-making—but his ennoblement is a sign that the Leader of the Opposition is not backing away from what are loosely and unhelpfully described as “culture wars”.

A similar motivation is surely present in the nomination of Toby Young, founder and General Secretary of the Free Speech Union (of which Biggar is Chair) and associate editor of The Spectator. Young is a veteran controversialist, as witnessed by his 2001 memoir of journalism, How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, and his work at the Free Speech Union and as editor of The Daily Sceptic, a website which challenges scientific orthodoxies, has often veered into the realms of spoiling for a fight. That said, his work in advocating the establishment of free schools, co-founding the West London Free School and serving as director of the New Schools Network, has been genuinely innovative and influential, and stems (I think) from genuine, deep-seated and broadly altruistic beliefs. Young is the son of a life peer, the sociologist and social activist Lord Young of Dartington, and he expressed mild disappointment in The Spectator at discovering he was not, as he hoped, the first child of a life peer to be granted a similar honour. He cited the example of the former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (whose parents were both life peers, Lord Brooke of Cumnor and Baroness Brooke of Ystradfellte), but, as I felt compelled to point out, it is a more common occurrence than he might have thought. Indeed, he is not even the only child of a life peer on this list, as one of the Labour nominees, Simon Pitkeathley, CEO of Camden Town Unlimited and formerly the Mayor of London’s Champion for Small Business, is the son of Baroness Pitkeathley, a Labour peer nominated by Sir Tony Blair in 1997.

Unless you fundamentally reject the current model of the mostly appointed House of Lords, none of the new peers strikes me as especially scandalous or unworthy (you may disagree with their politics or ideology, but that’s another argument). For the first time, citations have also been published in support of their nominations. This is a harmless measure but I don’t think it adds a whit to transparency: it shows nothing that was not already in the public domain, nor does it explicitly justify the nominations except insofar as we are to read the achievements of those honoured as being in general sufficient reason for them to be in the House of Lords.

In the absence of a fundamental change of the composition of the chamber, and the method of appointment (or election), the political parties will need regular reinforcements of men and women of some plausible public eminence who can contribute to the business of the House of Lords and be relied upon generally to vote according to the party whips. As I said at the beginning, these new peers, if taken with the anticipated exclusion of the excepted hereditary peers at some point next year or later, will bring Labour to within around 20 of the Conservatives as the largest party in the Lords. It is not unreasonable to assume that the Prime Minister intends to overtake the Official Opposition, so there will, I suspect, be more lists to come: apart from Rishi Sunak’s Resignation Honours, there may be peerage creations in the New Year Honours and next summer’s Birthday Honours, though Starmer can appoint a new tranche at any time. If you have your eyes on a new ermine-trimmed outfit, you know who to be nice to.