Life catches you out. Here I am, a socialist, empathising (a bit) with some of the most generationally privileged people in this nation. Last week, the House of Lords Hereditary Bill was passed. It rids us of the last 92 peers whose seats are passed on from father to son. The Tories fought ferociously to keep them in. Deals were done. The bill passed. 

The Leader of the Lords, Labour’s Baroness Smith said this fulfilled her government’s manifesto pledge that “no-one should sit in our Parliament by way of an inherited title”. And now they won’t. And I am thinking, do these peers, some hapless, really represent the only problem of legitimacy in the Lords? Or are the doomed peers being showcased to display Labour’s dusty egalitarian values, and – more seriously – to divert us from the actual scandals that have, for the longest time, sullied the second chamber?  

Lord Hamilton is a soundly upper-class life peer, whose father was bequeathed his seat. In his speech defending the forever peerages, Hamilton warned, the House would be left with “nothing other than political chancers, like me, and donors and members of the blob of one sort or other”.  The pomposity and false modesty are irksome; his class loyalty crude and........

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