Almost as rotten as an 18th-century assembly

YESTERDAY'S bumper Honours List provides us with another opportunity of having a look at the difficulties in which the Government finds itself over the House of Lords. In fact the subject did not need any reviving, or what we old newspapermen have been taught to call a "peg". It has been rumbling away for weeks, months even. Indeed, it appears that these days the Lords, like the poor, are always with us.

The trouble is largely of Mr Tony Blair's own making. Or, if it is not Mr Blair's fault, the blame must be shared between my old friend from Ammanford, Lord Richard, and someone with whom I have often had a drink in what Lord Beaverbrook used to call disapprovingly El Vino's public house, Lord Irvine. The mischief derives from a procrastination which is untypical of either of them or, come to that, of Mr Blair.

Let us return, as I sometimes do on these chilly evenings, to the manifesto. It did not promise to deliver a reformed House in one go. On the contrary: it promised that "as an initial, self-contained reform, not dependent on further reform in the future" the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords would be ended by statute. This would be the first stage in a process to make the Lords more democratic and representative. The present powers of the Lords would remain unaltered.

The system of appointing life peers would, however, be reviewed. The object would be to ensure that over time party appointees as life peers reflected more accurately the votes cast at the previous general election. But no one political party should seek a majority in the House. How the latter aim can be reconciled with the former is difficult to see. But there it is: I am for the moment engaging in public-service journalism and summarising what Labour promised in May 1997. The manifesto promised further that a committee of both Houses would be appointed to undertake a review of possible changes and then to bring forward proposals for reform.

The manifesto gave no hostages to the future about what those changes might be. In this respect it told us less than the trial-run manifesto, New Labour, New Life for Britain, published not long beforehand, which tentatively suggested that "one proposal we can consider is that the House of Lords has some places reserved by appointment for those who have an outstanding contribution to make". Who is to choose these philosopher kings? Who indeed!

In a speech last Monday Lord Richard said, perhaps rather grandly even for a Lord Privy Seal, that he made "no apology for not yet having reformed the House of Lords". They had a "very crowded legislative programme" and had to balance their parliamentary time between constitutional and other legislation. Well, yes: the language of priorities and all that. The case against Lord Richard and his colleagues is that they chose the wrong priorities.

The abolition of the voting and speaking rights of hereditary peers was bound to be a bloody business, in all senses of that adjective. As Macbeth put it: "If it were done when `tis done, then `twere well it were done quickly." I told them, but they wouldn't listen. So did other commentators, but they refused to listen to them either.

The result is that Lord Richard has wasted over a year having fruitless discussions with the Conservative leader in the upper House, Lord Cranborne. Labour's excuse is that, if Lords Richard and Cranborne had been able to agree, they would have produced a comprehensive solution, the so-called "big bang", which would have made unnecessary the second stage of consultation about the composition of the reformed chamber.

There are (and were initially) several objections to this method of proceeding. One is that anyone who knows the first thing about Lord Cranborne realises that he would insist on the retention of some hereditary element in any reformed chamber. This would cause Labour to break its promise - no, its solemn pledge - in the manifesto. Another is that the manifesto gives no warrant for the conduct of high-level inter-party talks or for the two stages to be lumped into one to provide Lord Richard with a negotiating triumph. And yet another (though this is perhaps an aspect of the previous objection) is that cosy inter-party fixes have a habit of coming unstuck. This was what happened to a previous attempt at Lords reform in 1968-69, when the scheme for a two-tier chamber concocted by Lord Carrington and Richard Crossman was aborted on the floor of the Commons by a combination of Enoch Powell and Michael Foot.

The first stage of Lords reform - the abolition of the speaking and voting rights of hereditary peers - is unlikely to meet this fate: not so much because of Mr Blair's majority (for Harold Wilson had a majority of just under a hundred) as because it is simple. It is also brutal. We all know, of course, that in any society great changes always hurt somebody. As Lord Deedes likes to express the matter, you can't make an omelette without frying eggs. Even so, I hope some means are contrived to avoid making the change too destructive. For instance, Lord Irvine's original proposals spared hereditary peers of first creation. Surprisingly, they are only a handful. They include not only members of the royal family (whose fate, I must confess, does not move me in the slightest) but also Lord Whitelaw, who has done the state some service in his time and should surely not be cast out into the snow in his declining years. The same argument would have applied to Lord Tonypandy had he lived. Then again there are hereditary peers, not necessarily all of them opposition spokesmen, but independent, even eccentric characters such as Lord Onslow, who deserve to have their parliamentary careers prolonged through the award of life peerages.

The real difficulty will begin with the second stage. In fact I rather doubt whether there ever will be a second stage. Lord Richard does not carry us much further than the manifesto: "There will be a wide-ranging consultative process to consider the options... and put forward recommendations for further change following the removal of the hereditary peers." The joint committee of both Houses is presumably still a possibility, though a Royal Commission is also being mentioned. For the moment, the House of Lords is to be the greatest quango in the kingdom. So it will remain, for a long time. It is profitless for Mr Blair, Lord Irvine, Lord Richard or anyone else to try to deny this self-evident truth.

The rational solution is to have a wholly elected House exercising senatorial powers, as the upper chamber does in most advanced democracies. My own scheme is for senators to be elected for life or until such time as they choose voluntarily to retire. This simple provision would immediately deprive governments, parties and whips of their coercive powers.

For this reason alone it will never be adopted. Indeed, an elected second chamber of any kind is highly unlikely. It would inevitably - and rightly - challenge the power of a House of Commons which is now almost as corrupt as any assembly of the 18th century in its dependence on government. What we are in for, I fear, is a system I call "quango-plus", of tinkering on the margins, with any elective principle merely a fig leaf covering the power of patronage.