Who should get peerages?
Boris Johnson's resignation honours list revived the controversy over appointed members of the House of Lords, and who deserves life peerages
In living memory, before 30 April 1958, the House of Lords looked very different from the way it does now. It was in theory even larger than today, though average attendance was dramatically smaller; it was entirely male; and the vast majority of its members held their right to sit by virtue of hereditary succession. There was also, as there had been ever since political party institutions had emerged in the 19th century, a heavy Conservative majority, while Labour, by then one of the two realistic parties of government, had a very small group indeed, no more than 15, not least because many socialists refused to accept hereditary titles.
There had been suggestions for reform and revitalisation of the Lords for many years, including for making provision for life peerages. The fifth Marquess of Salisbury, who led the Conservative peers from 1942 to 1957, had insisted that some measure of Lords reform was included in the party’s general election manifesto in 1951, Britain Strong and Free, but it was no more precise than pledging an all-party conference to consider the matter. Salisbury continues to worry that the House, in which the average attendance was well under 200, would simply lose its place in the constitutional arrangements, and said in 1956 “it is very feeble now”. Of course, a House with only powers to delay, dominated by the party of government, had little incentive to cause trouble.
In December 1952, Viscount Simon, who had held the unique quarter of offices of chancellor of the Exchequer, foreign secretary, home secretary and lord chancellor, introduced a private member’s bill, the Life Peers Bill [Lords}, which would have allowed the crown to create up to ten life peers each year. It was a modest measure, and would have taken decades to make any significant difference to the composition of the House, but it may perhaps have spurred the government into action. Eventually, in December 1957, the government introduced its own bill to provide for the appointment of an unlimited number of men and women to sit in the House of Lords as barons or baronesses for life. It was an exceptionally short bill, consisting of one clause of 230 words, and was given a Second Reading by the Lords unopposed.
Although there were some wranglings over the bill, which seem hard to understand at this distance of time, the Life Peerages Act 1958 was granted Royal Assent on 30 April 1958. If it was a limited measure in terms of overall reform of the House, it would transform the composition and character of the Lords more than any other change until the House of Lords Act 1999, which excluded all but 92 of the hereditary peers. Although the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, had excoriated the bill during its passage as simply strengthening an institution which was inimical to socialism, he was a realist. As the prime minister, Harold Macmillan (who never liked Gaitskell), noted acidly in his diary, “After all the socialist protestations regarding life peers—they will never touch it etc, etc—he had produced five or six nominations!”
The first tranche of 14 life peers was announced in 28 July 1958, consisting of 10 men and four women. The men were: Sir Bob Boothby, Conservative MP for East Aberdeenshire; Victor Collins, Labour MP for Shoreditch and Finsbury; Sir Ian Fraser, Conservative MP for Morecambe and Lonsdale; Sir Charles Geddes, former general secretary of the Union of Post Office Workers; Granville West, Labour MP for Pontypool; Lord Justice Parker, of the Court of Appeal; Victor Noel-Paton, chairman of Edinburgh Pharmaceutical Industries; Edward Shackleton, for Labour MP for Preston South; Professor Sir John Stopford, former vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester; Dr Stephen Taylor, director of Harlow Industrial Health Service; and Sir Edward Twining, former governor of Tanganyika. The four women, two of whom already held noble titles, were: Irene, 2nd Baroness Ravensdale, president of the London Union of Youth Clubs; Dame Katharine Elliot, chair of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations; Stella, Marchioness of Reading, chair of the Women’s Voluntary Service; and Professor Barbara Wootton, vice-president of the Ethical Union.
All but one of the first peers were chosen as candidates of impeccable probity (the exception being Boothby, a bisexual philanderer with shady friends and shady finances who had been having an affair with Macmillan’s wife since 1930). But the innovation of the life peerage clearly opened the way to appointing a range of people to the Upper House. Rab Butler, who as home secretary had taken the Act through its stages in the Commons, explained at the Second Reading debate whom the government hoped to see become new peers.
What we want to achieve is the addition to the House of Lords of men and women of distinction from all main sectors of our national life, men and women who will strengthen it by their knowledge of affairs and their experience and widely varied interests, political, scientific, economic, cultural and religious. By this means we may hope to ensure that in carrying out its important duties of revising or initiating legislation, and of debating the great issues of public policy which continually arise, the House of Lords will adequately and accurately reflect the life and thought of the nation.
Butler stressed that while, understandably, many of the peers would be chosen on a party political basis, there would be other candidates “who, though not actively associated with any political party, are qualified by their eminence in other spheres to make a constructive contribution to the work of Parliament”. This was the beginning of the substantial body of crossbench peers who now wield significant influence.
In practice, there were two groups of peers nominated: those who were appointed to the House of Lords to work, whether as ministers or in some other capacity; and those for whom the peerage was largely an honour, which happened to carry with it the right to speak and vote in Parliament. But these groups were informal divisions, and in that lay the particular quality of the House of Lords which persists to this day in the overused and exaggerated appellation of a “house of experts”. For example, an eminent scientist or engineer might be granted a peerage in recognition of his or her professional career, but he or she would then have the right to participate in debates to which expertise might be relevant and valuable. This variable membership is still reflected in the fact that peers do not receive a salary for their membership, but may claim an attendance allowance of £332 per day. They may, therefore, attend infrequently but still feel that they are making a contribution to the work of the House.
(For what it’s worth, although the eminence and expertise of the House is often overplayed, the fact it exists at all is, for me, one of the most valuable elements of the current composition of the Lords. And it is a quality which will only remain through a largely appointed system, as retired academics and former captains of industry will simply not stand for election in large numbers. You may or may not value their presence and contribution, but you must accept that a wholly or largely elected chamber will not preserve it.)
More than 1,500 life peers have been created since 1958. Of these, a third have been former MPs, moving to the Lords after retirement, to compensate for electoral defeat or to continue front bench roles in the upper house. (For example, Lord McAvoy, the jovially menacing former Member for Rutherglen, was Labour’s deputy chief whip in the Commons from 1997 to 2010, then played the same role in the Lords from 2010 to 2018, before becoming chief whip from 2018 to 2021.) Sometimes these duties can come unexpectedly: David Hunt lost his seat of Wirral West at the 1997 general election after a respectable ministerial career which included seven years in cabinet under Margaret Thatcher (for a few months) and John Major. He was granted a peerage after his defeat, and moved into the private sector as senior partner at law firm Beachcroft Wansbroughs, but in 2008, when Lord Mandelson was brought into the cabinet as business, enterprise and regulatory reform secretary, David Cameron approached the 66-year-old Lord Hunt of Wirral to rejoin the front bench to shadow him.
Perceptions change over time. There was considerable furore over Harold Wilson’s resignation honours list in 1976, known as the “Lavender List” after journalist Joe Haines claimed—without any evidence ever being adduced—that the first draft was written on lavender notepaper by Wilson’s political secretary, Marcia Williams. Many names on the list were deemed controversial at best, including industrialist Lord Kagan, who would be convicted of fraud in 1980, and property magnate Sir Eric Miller, who committed suicide while under investigation for fraud in 1977. But concerns about nominations had already been raised by Williams herself, whom Wilson had nominated for a life peerage in 1974. She had taken the title Baroness Falkender, her mother’s maiden name, and by the time she died in 2019, she was Labour’s longest-serving peer. Yet she had never spoken in the House of Lords.
There is nothing inherently improper or undignified about awarding peerages to advisers who are essentially behind-the-scenes operators. Dr Bernard Donoughue of the LSE was appointed to head the Number 10 Policy Unit by Wilson in 1974, and was retained by James Callaghan after his accession to the premiership in 1976. After the election defeat of 1979, he combined journalism with private sector work but was nominated for a peerage in 1985. In sharp contradistinction to Falkender, Donoughue served on the opposition front bench and then, from 1997 to 1999, was minister for farming and the food industry at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. He has also contributed to the proceedings of the House as a backbencher.
One striking change, however, only really evident over the past seven or eight years, has been the appointment of younger prime ministerial advisers as working peers. It began with David Cameron. The honours list he issued in August 2015 after Parliament was dissolved for the general election included Kate Fall (48), deputy chief of staff, and Simone Finn (47), special adviser to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude. His resignation honours, issued in August 2016, included Gabrielle Bertin (38), Downing Street director of external relations; Camilla Cavendish (47), head of the Number 10 Policy Unit; Ed Llewellyn (50), the prime minister’s chief of staff; Liz Sugg (49), Downing Street head of operations; and Laura Wyld (38), head of the Prime Minister’s Appointments Unit.
That these were mainly mid-career women was striking. Theresa May’s resignation honours, issued in September 2019, contained some comparable figures. Notable were Gavin Barwell (47), her chief of staff; Stephen Parkinson (36), political secretary to the prime minister; JoJo Penn (34), deputy chief of staff; and Elizabeth Sanderson (48), head of features for the prime minister.
There has been a clear trend, then, to offer peerages, generally working peerages, to members of Downing Street staff who would previously have been regarded as too junior to receive such an award, and at a stage in their careers at which, traditionally, they would not have been offered, and perhaps would not have accepted, a peerage. There are several possible reasons for the development. The first is that the political staff in Downing Street is enlarging and including more figures who are ambitious and public-facing enough to accept a career as legislators and, perhaps, ministers. However, they are also not sufficiently ambitious to want to seek election to the House of Commons and therefore keep open the possibility of achieving very high political office. (That said, if the prime minister were to offer me a peerage and the possibility of a front bench position, I would nobly shrug aside ambitions to be an MP or lead my country and instead remain undisturbed in the upper house until or unless it is reformed.)
By and large, I see nothing wrong in this. If someone is able and politically astute enough to serve as a senior adviser in Downing Street, he or she would seem to me to have a claim to a seat in an appointed chamber of parliament, just as former MPs, councillors, party activists and trades unions have. Some of them may have been conspicuously young by the standards of the House of Lords, but with the average age of peers at 71, that may not be a bad thing. Even those who might object to some of the names above would, I think, at least admit there is a clear and logical thought process.
All of this brings us, as it inevitably would, to the recent publication, somewhat delayed, of Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list. Perhaps our palates have become jaded, but it has not caused quite the outrage that Wilson’s Lavender List did. But some names have been singled out for robust discussion. The BBC reported that eight names, allegedly nominated for peerages, were rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. No names have been confirmed officially but are suspected to include Nadine Dorries, former culture secretary, and Nigel Adams, former minister without portfolio. But there has also been anger directed at the names which were included.
Life peerages have been awarded to Ben Gascoigne (believed to be 40), Johnson’s former political secretary and deputy chief of staff; Dan Rosenfield (46), former Downing Street chief of staff; Ross Kempsell (31), political director of the Conservative Party; and, most notoriously, Charlotte Owen (29), briefly a special adviser in Downing Street. Owen has been the subject of intense press scrutiny and some wild speculation, though she has made no comment herself, but she is the youngest person ever to be given a life peerage.
Owen and Kempsell are, let us be frank, very young to be peers. But Baroness Penn was only 34 and has gone on to be a whip and is now a Treasury minister, while Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, 36 when ennobled, also had a short stint as a whip and is now minister for the arts. Neither has encountered any significant levels of criticism on grounds of age; and, in one sense, why should they? There was great approbation when Mhairi Black was elected as an SNP MP in 2015 at the age of 20, and when Nadia Whittome became Labour Member for Nottingham East aged 23, in 2019. In the private sector, Fortune magazine publishes a yearly list of 40 business leaders under 40, and Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 26.
Yet I have to concede that Owen’s nomination in particular feels wrong. (I should say that I don’t hold her responsible. I’ve never met her and have no mutual acquaintances of any closeness, but I make no judgement on her at all.) The age of 30 seems some kind of instinctive benchmark or minimum age, and her case to be taking a seat in the Lords for life (or until life peers are removed) at 29 is not helped by the mystery over her actual function in Downing Street. She graduated from the University of York in 2015 with a 2:1 in politics and international relations, After working in Johnson’s parliamentary office from 2018 to 2021, she became a special adviser in the Number 10 Policy Unit, where she stayed until Johnson resigned, then during Liz Truss’s brief tenure she advised the prime minister and the chief whip, Wendy Morton. That, at least, is the official story.
There seem to be some inconsistencies or inaccuracies in her LinkedIn profile. The annual report on special advisers from June 2021 does not include her name, while that from June 2022 lists her as working jointly for the prime minister and Chris Heaton-Harris, then chief whip. One Downing Street insider denies that Owen ever worked in the Policy Unit, while another, confirming this, states that she joined Downing Street only in March 2022. “She wasn’t even the most important person in the political office, that is the odd part,” remarked one of the sources, while the other explained “her peerage is one of the most strange and hardest to explain because she was so extraordinarily junior”. She was on the second lowest pay band (of four) for special advisers, which covers the broad range of £57,000 to £84,000. Liz Bates of Sky News noted that Owen’s was “not an illustrious political career by any stretch”, but then, she is only 29 years old.
There is a danger that we conflate to distinct issues. The first is whether Charlotte Owen is a suitable candidate for nomination to the House of Lords, taking all factors into account. Even a generous interpretation of her CV would make it a difficult case to argue: a couple of years as a junior special adviser in Downing Street, with no tales of outstanding political guile or extraordinary intellectual capability and virtually no experience of professional life outside politics add up to a thin application form. There are, of course, a number of rumours circulating on the Internet about her, which I won’t waste time repeating, any of which, if true, would make her candidacy even less defensible. Padding out a LinkedIn entry is neither the crime of the century nor a unique misdeed, but it is awkward when someone is suddenly put under the most intense scrutiny, and her decision to make no comment nor issue any clarifications or amendments has not helped her cause. So, whatever motivated Boris Johnson to submit her name to HM The King for a life peerage, she does seem a lightweight, underqualified candidate for membership of the House of Lords.
The second issue, however, which is being wittingly or unwittingly folded into the first, is whether someone of her age, under 30, should be put in the House of Lords at all. This I find slightly harder to judge. It would not be difficult to gain consensus for the notion that, however arbitrary the limit might be, peers should not be appointed under 30, or maybe 35 (though I’m not sure I would sign up to it without reservations). In general, someone at that young age has relatively little life experience, and experience in professional terms in particular. The difficulty is that rules are easy to make in general but almost as easy to challenge in particular. If you imposed a limit of 35, and an outstanding candidate of 34 came along, would it be right and sensible to stand inflexibly on that point of principle? If not, then why 34 and not 33? And so it goes on.
For as long as the system of appointed life peers persists, they will be awarded for one of many reasons: honour, political expediency, reward of loyalty or potential contribution. This variety makes the House of Lords relatively diverse (in some ways), and I would argue the case for a brilliant young lawyer of 35 as well as for a distinguished engineer of 75. This is, for me, one of the House’s strengths. I am also content for nomination powers to remain with the prime minister of the day, but the Charlotte Owen affair has shown us that there must be a degree of greater transparency. Perhaps HOLAC could produce a short report on each peer, outlining reasons for nomination, relevant experience and achievements, and any other relevant information. What does seem clear is that, to borrow Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield’s phraseology, we have managed until now on the basis of “good chaps” respecting the system and reining in their behaviour. It is not an enormous surprise that Boris Johnson, the antithesis of the “good chap”, has brought this under a strain which may be too much.