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Boris Johnson is planning to fill the Lords with
his cronies and legitimise bribery
Gordon
Brown
The honours system is rife with abuse and a paper by
Lynton Crosby’s firm suggesting ‘rewards’ for compliant peers proves it
‘Boris Johnson’s latest attempt to manipulate the
Lords’ system is the culmination of years of constitutional vandalism.’
Fri 29 Jul
2022 16.00 BST
Exactly 100
years ago, with his government embroiled in scandal after scandal that included
the sale of peerages, the then prime minister, David Lloyd George, was brought
down by Conservative backbench MPs. Now, with the current prime minister also
having been unceremoniously dispatched by Conservative backbenchers, his
attempt in his final weeks to create multiple new peerages is once again
placing the House of Lords at the centre of scandal.
A
confidential document prepared by CT Group, the influential lobbying firm run
by Lynton Crosby which advises Boris Johnson, and which I have seen, makes no
bones about the defenestrated prime minister’s aim to pack the House of Lords.
The document proposes that Johnson ride roughshod over every convention and
standard of propriety in an effort to secure political nominees who will vote
for the Tory government, especially its bill to disown the international treaty
it has itself signed over Northern Ireland.
This draft
plan to add 39 to 50 new Tory peers includes an extraordinary requirement that
each new peer sign away their right to make their own judgment on legislation
that comes before them. They have to give, the paper says, a written
undertaking to attend and vote with the government.
The plan
also legitimises straightforward bribery. In a throwback to the Old Corruption
that was a feature of 19th-century Tory Britain, compliant lords will be
“rewarded” with lucrative special envoy positions, and, while those who fail to
attend votes will be placed on a “name and shame” list, CBEs and additional
titles will be handed out, responding to what is an apparently insatiable
demand for the already ennobled to be showered with additional honours on top
of their peerages.
But the
cynicism of the Crosby firm’s paper plumbs new depths when outlining what it
calls “useful cover from any media backlash”. The perpetrators of this coup
will claim, wholly falsely, that their real aim is to redress the balance
between the south-east, which has the largest number of peers, and the north of
England, Scotland and Wales, which are underrepresented, as though the award of
peerages is a genuine form of levelling up.
The paper
also suggests that the “perfect excuse” to flood the House of Lords with
Johnson’s cronies will be the Lords’ doubts about a hard Brexit, “on the
grounds that the ‘People’s Brexit’ can only be delivered by such a wedge of new
Tories”. This will, it says, provide an “excellent cover” for railroading the
nominations. The report is also useful cover for Crosby, whose firm has had
close links with the tobacco industry, when it states that the creation of Tory
peers is also justified by the refusal so far of the Lords to vote for a
“laissez-faire attitude to tobacco manufacturers and importers”.
The media,
according to the Crosby firm’s paper, can be easily blindsided by the
appointment of a few controversial figures or well-known celebrities, which
will distract journalists away from the real issue, which is the sheer scale of
the gerrymandering.
One of the
claims the House of Lords makes for its existence is that it is a revising
chamber, willing to take an independent view and bringing in expertise on a
non-party basis; but the Crosby firm’s plot would negate the nomination of such
independent peers.
Opinion
polls show this plan would be opposed by the public: 71% of Britons back
overhauling the House of Lords and opposition to the current Lords is as
strongly felt among Conservative as Labour voters, among remainers as well as
leavers and in the south as well as the north. Support for the second chamber
has declined to as low as 12% of the public; and with more than half of the
British public thinking the House of Lords does not work, the solution is to
reform the Lords, not reinforce its unrepresentativeness.
The Crosby
firm’s paper inadvertently makes the case for this radical overhaul. It is “not
clear” why most of the members of the Lords were appointed, it says. The Tory
ministers in the Lords are “inadequate” with “little to offer”. The leader of
the Lords is “a poor political manager”. All of which raises profound questions
about what the current appointments system has thrown up and calls into
question the unfettered patronage of the prime minister who alone can recommend
appointments to the Queen.
Past prime
ministers have realised that there have to be limits to the use of this power,
and Tony Blair and I declined to submit the traditional resignation honours
list, the abuse of which has undermined the reputation of a number of past prime
ministers.
There are,
of course, many honourable, dedicated and diligent members of the House of
Lords, who should be praised for doing their best for the country and whose
contributions to public life make the case for a reformed second chamber.
But Johnson’s
latest attempt to manipulate the Lords’ system is the culmination of years of
constitutional vandalism, during which he and his predecessors have been
shameless in their appointment of Conservative party donors, rewarding them for
what they did to advance a narrow party interest, not the wider public
interest.
Since 2010,
successive prime ministers have elevated nine of the party’s former treasurers,
each of whom has donated at least £3m to the party prior to their nomination.
This has included the Johnson cheerleader Peter Cruddas, whose nomination
Johnson pushed through even after he was deemed unsuitable by the independent
House of Lords Appointments Commission. “Once you pay your £3m, you get your
peerage,” one former Conservative party chair said.
Money
talks, and nowhere more so than in the Lords. Twenty-two of the party’s biggest
donors – who together have donated £54m to the Conservatives – have been made
lords since 2010. Not only do these 22 have peerages but, as one leading Tory
donor, Mohamed Amersi, confirmed this week when talking of “access capitalism”,
large cash donations give “a privileged few unrivalled access to
decision-makers”, adding up to “as I fear … an implied or expressed quid pro
quo” that is “undermining our democracy”. He proposes “a new source of funding
that would undermine the current system of the privileged few gaining access”.
Indeed the party’s chief fundraiser and co-chair, Ben Elliot, he says, has
taken “access capitalism to a new level within the party” without any proper
transparency, which is why he is fittingly known as Mr Access All Areas. And we
now know of investigations involving members of the House of Lords into the
fast-tracking of lucrative Covid contracts.
I tried in
2008 to press ahead with a major reform of the Lords but we were defeated – as
previous attempts have been – by the combined weight of peers who favour no
reform at all, those who found a reason to disagree with the specifics of our
proposed reform and those who claim the only acceptable reform is total
abolition. Now it is time to flush out who really wants change and who does
not. The preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act stated that the power of the House
of Lords was no more than an interim solution until a second chamber constituted
on a popular instead of hereditary basis could be brought into operation. More
than a century on, the modern constitution envisaged then still eludes us.
The
abolition of the current House of Lords was one of the 10 commitments Keir
Starmer made when assuming the Labour party leadership. Now Boris Johnson and
Lynton Crosby have handed him the strongest possible case for long overdue
reform.
Gordon
Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
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