Godfrey John Bewicke-Copley, the 7th Baron Cromwell, traces his family’s title back to 1375. His forebears fought the French at the Battle of Agincourt. For the last decade, Lord Cromwell’s day job has been in Britain’s House of Lords, where he mulls legislation, runs to committee meetings and briskly greets fellow lawmakers in Parliament, many of whom are elected.
His right to be there is rooted in his ancestry: Hereditary peers inherit their seats, in his case from his father, the 6th Baron Cromwell. But Lord Cromwell insists that his aristocratic lineage has little bearing on his work as a public servant in the halls of Westminster.
“We are not the port-swilling, fox-hunting hoorays on vast Downton Abbey-esque estates of popular imagination,” he said. “Indeed, sometimes people are rather disappointed when they find that we are typically hard-working professionals of one sort or another.”
For Lord Cromwell, that includes a career in private banking, advising companies on doing business in Russia — something he longer does — and running the family farm in Leicestershire. Gregarious, well-informed and opinionated, Lord Cromwell, 64, has spoken up regularly in debates on issues from Ukraine to water quality.
None of that will spare him from being evicted when the Labour government enacts a law eliminating hereditary peers, likely by the middle of next year. Labour argues that these peers are undemocratic, a relic as superannuated as the ermine robes they wear. Purging them is the first step to reforming an ancient institution which, though it has little more than a consultative role in lawmaking, has become, by all accounts, bloated, hidebound and ethically dodgy.
Lord Cromwell, whose family name is Bewicke-Copley, admits a touch sadly that he is related to neither of England’s most famous Cromwells, Oliver and Thomas. Having first gained his seat in 1982 after his father’s death in a riding accident, he views the passage of the law with regret but also stoic acceptance. He even manages a dash of mordant wit.
“Christmas is approaching,” he said during a debate on the legislation this month. “While, as one of the so-called turkeys directly affected by the bill, I might abstain on it, I certainly do not propose to obstruct or delay it.”
Instead, Lord Cromwell pleaded to convert the most active and engaged of the 88 remaining hereditary peers to so-called “life peers,” which would save their seats and grant them the same status as a majority of the 805 members of the Lords, whose peerages are bestowed on them by the prime minister and who can remain in their seats for life.
“The hereditary principle is indefensible, other perhaps than by appeals to romantic ideas about growing up with a sense of duty,” he said in an interview. “I do not defend it and am happy with the government’s commitment to end it.”
But Lord Cromwell noted a paradox at the heart of the House of Lords: since 1999, hereditary peers have actually been elected — albeit by their fellow peers, not by the country. Life peers are simply appointed, ostensibly for their public service but often as a reward for donating money to political parties.
That is a result of a deal cut by a previous Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, who ran into resistance when he set out to cull all the hereditary peers. Mr. Blair swept out most of them — including Lord Cromwell, who regained his seat in a peers’ by-election in 2014 — but agreed to let a rump group remain until a future government could carry out a more root-and-branch overhaul.
Now that moment has come. But the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also retreated from an earlier vow to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a “new, reformed upper chamber.” Instead, it is again singling out hereditary peers, who are in some ways low-hanging fruit, while leaving unresolved the thornier question of what to do about the more politically connected life peers.
To Lord Cromwell, that does little to advance reform. Many life peers, he said, scarcely bother to show up for work, while the appointments process has devolved into a vast patronage machine.
“This positively feudal system makes the hereditary elections look democratic,” he said over coffee in Portcullis House, Parliament’s office building, across the street from Big Ben.
On Friday, Mr. Starmer submitted his first list of 30 nominees for peerages. It attests to how the Lords has become a handy way to reward friends and offer consolation prizes to fallen allies. On the list were Labour members of the House of Commons who had been voted out of their seats, as well as Mr. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sue Gray, who left after losing out in a feud with other advisers.
Her elevation to the Lords drew quiet grumbles about hypocrisy from Conservatives. Many have reviled Ms. Gray since she played a role in the downfall of a previous prime minister, Boris Johnson, by leading an investigation into social gatherings held in 10 Downing Street that violated Covid lockdown restrictions.
But Mr. Johnson, his critics say, corrupted the appointments process more than anyone. Among his peers were Evgeny Lebedev, a Russian-British media baron who publishes the London Evening Standard and is the son of a former K.G.B. officer, and Charlotte Owen, a 31-year-old former aide to Mr. Johnson whose thin résumé raised questions about why she deserved a lifetime sinecure.
“Prime ministers have abused the powers of patronage to appoint cronies,” said Vernon Bogdanor, a political scientist at King’s College London. “You can still, in effect, buy a place in the chamber.”
The debate over reforming the House of Lords has always seemed a bit precious to some. By convention, it does not block government legislation; its role is mainly to raise questions about bills. Earlier this year, several of the peers objected on human rights grounds to a plan by the previous Conservative government to put asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda (the law passed anyway but was scrapped by the Labour government).
Lord Beaverbrook, a newspaper baron of another age, once called it “the house of make-believe.” Gilbert and Sullivan, in their comic opera “Iolanthe,” said it “did nothing in particular, and did it very well.”
Still, Professor Bogdanor said, the antediluvian nature of the Lords eroded faith in government generally, particularly among young people. At a minimum, it needs to be downsized. As critics delight in noting, it is the world’s second-largest legislative body after China’s National People’s Congress. Other reforms being mooted include age limits or term limits for peers.
Even these changes are likely to run into resistance, either from the peers themselves or from the Conservative Party, which has long enjoyed a numerical advantage in the chamber. That is why Lord Cromwell and his fellow aristocrats find themselves on the chopping block.
“The reason they’re starting with these is that it is the least controversial part of this in the country as a whole,” said Simon McDonald, a former head of the British diplomatic service who is a cross-bench, or nonpartisan, peer. “The hereditary principle is kind of discredited as a governing principle.”
Mr. McDonald said he favored term limits and more scrutiny of people who get life peerages. But neither of those, he said, would justify preserving hereditary peers. For one thing, they are all men, owing to the hurdles for women in inheriting most peerages. The last female hereditary peer, Margaret Alison of Mar, a Scottish politician known as the Countess of Mar, retired in 2020.
Lord Cromwell pointed to accomplishments like persuading the second chamber to create a committee to monitor the development of space, as well as strengthening legislation that would curb nuisance lawsuits against journalists. To the critics, it all sounds familiar — and unpersuasive.
“Their first argument is that the hereditary peers are, to a man, good, upstanding men who do their shift,” Mr. McDonald said. “I’m sure everyone agrees with that. My answer to that is, So what?”
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