Goodbye (almost) to the hereditary peers, voted out on Tuesday night. But they didn’t go without a vicious tooth-and-nail fight. Labour should be making much more noise about how the Tories blackmailed and threatened to the very last to hold on to the hereditary peerage (almost all Tories), despite 66% of voters wanting a democratically elected second chamber.

Tories in the Lords, fully backed by Kemi Badenoch, did that despite the abolition pledged in Labour’s manifesto. They trashed the Salisbury convention, which expects the Lords to nod through anything in a government’s manifesto that has been approved in an election. But never mind conventions: the good chaps who are supposed to keep the unwritten constitution on its feet are no more. Instead of upholding convention, they vandalised it.

The absurdity of the final Lords debate may add to Samuel Johnson’s gaiety of nations. Enjoy Lord Hamilton’s searing honesty, when he said that a reason to keep the hereditaries was that once they were gone there would be “nothing other than political chancers, like me, and donors and members of the blob of one sort or another”.

Or Lord Moore, who said their “lack [of] legitimacy” was a badge of honour as “you behave a bit better because you are a little doubtful about whether you should be there”. Or the Earl of Devon, who said that under normal employment law, there would be discrimination concerns “given the regrettable commonality of protected characteristics among our hereditary peers”, presumably as all-male, all-white, blue-bloods. When I debated with the earl this week on the........

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