I went to university with Charlotte Owen. If she’s a worthy lifetime peer, I’m a baroness

To say that Baroness Charlotte Owen’s rise to power has been meteoric would be something of an understatement. The 30-year-old, who was awarded Britain’s highest honour in Boris Johnson’s resignation list and has now taken her seat in the House of Lords, has gone from parliamentary intern to baroness in a matter of just six years.

She is currently the youngest person ever to sit in the House of Lords, but of course there is no expiration date on her new privilege. As a life peer, she will be scrutinising our legislation until she chooses to retire – and judging by the current House of Lords demographic, that’s not likely to be any time in the next half century.

I’ve monitored Lady Owen’s career with interest, and increasing bafflement, over the years because until a couple of years ago it almost precisely mirrored my own. We both studied at York University between 2012 and 2015, and even had a few mutual friends; when asked to describe her, one says, rather cattily: “Yeah she was fun, bit of a party girl, don’t remember her showing any great prowess for legislative scrutiny.” Like me, she went from university into the House of Commons to work as a parliamentary assistant for a government minister, in her case the right honourable Boris Johnson MP, then foreign secretary.

Now, at this point, it’s worth explaining that as a blanket rule, being a parliamentary assistant to a government minister is a very different kettle of fish to working for a regular common or garden MP. Whereas ambitious backbenchers are entitled to just two or three members of staff and work them round the clock preparing parliamentary speeches, briefing documents and committee interventions, frontbenchers have a whole department’s worth of civil servants working on their ministerial business, and, crucially, are in many respects excluded from parliamentary goings on.

As a frontbencher, you do not sit on select committees, propose private members bills, or lobby the government about constituent campaigns. Given that every MP is also entitled to a caseworker specifically to deal with local concerns (think visa problems and library closures), this made for a rather laid back life for us parliamentary-assistants-to-ministers. While our backbench office colleagues slaved away into the evenings, come 5.30pm we frontbench lackeys would frequently find ourselves soaking up some sun on the House of Commons terrace.

After a couple of years of this pleasant existence, I, like most young parliamentary assistants, thought it was time to leave Westminster for a while and try my hand at something a bit less ephemeral. Charlotte, meanwhile, stayed in parliament, and in 2021 was promoted to special adviser. She spent 18 months in that role before Boris Johnson stepped down.

Now, perhaps Baroness Owen is entirely deserving of her peerage. Maybe in that year and a half as a special adviser she was the sole driving force behind legislation that fundamentally made the UK a better place to live. Or perhaps her experience in parliament was entirely different from mine. It’s perfectly possible, of course, that once he’d finished his ministerial work, Boris Johnson beavered away into the night, working tirelessly to address the injustices suffered by the people of Ruislip and Uxbridge. He may, with Charlotte stoutly by his side, have pored over arcane legislation, desperately hunting for ways to get around the parliamentary limitations imposed on him by his role as foreign secretary. We can’t, I suppose, rule anything out.

If, as I suspect might be more likely, Boris Johnson has elevated her to the Lords simply because they had a good personal relationship, eyebrows will be raised over whether the honours system in the UK is really fit for purpose.

I, meanwhile, have less lofty questions. If we’re in the business of enobling 30-year old York graduates with short and not particularly distinguished careers in parliament behind them, then where, dear prime minister, is my peerage?

Olivia Utley is a political reporter at GB News