November 27, 2023 - 3:00pm
You know something is rotten in the British political order when your spouse starts getting marketing emails for a service offering to grease his application for the House of Lords. Not, I hasten to add, because there’s anything wildly unsuitable about my husband as a candidate. But the sheer tawdriness of the “service” offered by Awards Intelligence took me aback.
A sheaf of media coverage confirms that it is indeed a real business, started in 2007 by former Bell Pottinger PR Mark Llwellyn-Slade. A regular on Royal Honours news segments, on his own website Llwellyn-Slade describes how he set up the business after realising that awards offer a significant PR opportunity for business clients. It was this realisation that, he recounts, gave him the germ of the idea for a concierge service for obtaining what money can’t buy.
For those with the stomach for such naked status-peddling, this is an increasingly rich market. As overall living standards have risen over the last half-century, out-competing the Joneses has become increasingly challenging. Before the 1960s, owning a television was a rare luxury: in the 1940s, a black-and-white TV set would cost the real-terms equivalent of about £6,400. Today, a new flatscreen TV costs around £350.
But as such once-desirable consumer goods have grown ubiquitous, so the competition for what sociologists call positional goods has intensified. The price of access to exclusive schools and desirable postcodes has risen sharply, for example, even as the price of previously exclusive goods such as flatscreen TVs has slumped.
No surprise, then, to find that an industry of commercial fixers has emerged to deal with the administrative hassle involved in bagging the most exclusive positional goods of all. From this perspective, what Awards Intelligence does is not markedly different from the countless services now routinely employed by the sharp-elbowed middle classes, to optimise their offspring’s chances of a sought-after scholarship or fine-tune their Oxbridge application. If you’re posh enough to have all the cars, houses and club memberships you desire, you can now pay a man with a ridiculous moustache to try and bag you a seat in the Lords, as a flex.
But there is a difference. Membership of Britain’s upper chamber is, at least in theory, about public service, not keeping up with the Joneses. Flogging access on the latter basis is a squalid inversion of its purported role — one made possible by New Labour’s disastrous “modernising” reforms. In theory, expelling the hereditary Lords in favour of appointees was meant to level a baked-in social inequality, while widening the field of public servants from which our upper chamber could be drawn.
But the existence of Awards Intelligence suggests that, in practice, one unintended consequence of that levelling and widening has been the exposure of a previously-protected flank of our already limping body politic, to scavenging status-peddlers from the PR industry.
Perhaps I shouldn’t feel disgust at these scavengers, auctioning off once-solemn positions of public respect as status baubles for the vain and wealthy. No doubt influence-peddlers have always existed; certainly, there have been enough recent Tory lobbying scandals. But the bare-faced frankness with which such brokerage is now offered confirms loud and clear what most already intuit.
Our hereditary ruling class may have been at times mad, inbred, or crapulent. But at least they had skin in the game. By contrast, the “modernised” pay-to-play version is clearly innocent of any sense of public service, instead viewing the public as existing in service to them. After two decades of their depredations, no wonder Britain is circling the drain.
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SubscribeThe owl of minerva flies at dusk. Only now do we begin to understand what was lost when the Lords was ‘reformed’.
I too at the time could not think of a decent defense of hereditary privilege. Now I perceive that, in fact, all rights and privileges are inherited. From the Duke of Norfolk to the council house tenant, our rights, liberties and property are all ours by an ‘accident of birth’.
As King Charles I said in Westminster Hall the last time the Lords was abolished and phoney democrats thought to upend the constitution:
” it is not my case alone, it is the freedom and the liberty of the people of England; and do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties. For if power without law, may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life, or any thing that he calls his own.”
The descendent of Sir Edmund Verney, who held the Royal Standard at Edgehill, and was slain in arms still clutching the flagstaff, was turned out of the Palace of Westminster and for what? So that the likes of Lord Sugar and Baroness Mone could occupy the red benches.
The owl of minerva flies at dusk.
The whale sings in the inky deeps.
This both amused and depressed me; it says a lot about modern Britain that a commission to select new life peerages was criticized for picking candidates distinguished in their fields. I mean, God forbid that membership in the UK’s aristocracy (Gr., “rule by the best”) should be based on merit.
If we don’t want people to “buy” peerages, then make them less attractive.
The HofL should be slimmed down to whatever number of peers is sufficient to carry out the work it does – and no more. Remaining members should be expected to perform their parliamentary duties – or immediately retire. (They can keep their robes, coronet and title if that makes it easier to put them out to pasture). Maybe operate a 3-out, 1-in policy until reaching a sustainable level.
We certainly can’t justify the current size of the Lords – and the eye-watering sums of tax-payers’ money it takes to prop up what is only an amending chamber. Slim down the chamber and frankly most people wouldn’t care whether some donor wants to buy himself the title of Baron Parvenu of Greasypole
Besides, if most Life peers were removed from Parliamentary business, then such peerages would have no more social cachet than one of those daft “Laird of Glenn Twee” things you can buy with a half an acre of peat-bog.
It’s difficult enough to make a convincing intellectual case for the House of Lords as an unelected 2nd chamber, so it’s nigh-on impossible to make the case for an hereditary one. However, human nature being what it is, with politicians (for the most part) being susceptible to all the basest human foibles, if the job of a peer is to scrutinise legislation and to hold the executive to account, then being removed from the need for electioneering and political patronage is surely a benefit.
Although I’m not seriously advocating for a return of the Hereditaries, the reason that it worked for so long was precisely because peers had no great need for advancement, nor for monetary gain – they and their families were already secure.
Added to that was the sense of “Noblesse Oblige” – which still had some validity in earlier ages. Sadly gone now, it would seem.
Compare that to today where many of our appointed (or “Purchased”) life peers conjure for themselves far too much “Noblesse” and not bloody half enough “Oblige”.
“the reason that it worked for so long was precisely because peers had no great need for advancement”
There’s a lot to be said for that. At least the hereditaries were aware that they were there solely as an accident of birth, and were this duty-bound to perform their parliamentary functions.
Now, most people these days would claim to be in favour of something called “meritocracy” where status is bestowed according to one’s achievements. This sounds great until you realise that this rewards ruthless, ambitious, unprincipled types types who will stop at nothing in order to get to the top. Compared to such a psychopaths’ charter, a congregation of bumbling squires actually sounds quite appealing.
So, who would you prefer to have sitting in the Lord’s, someone who’s distant ancestor received patronage from Charles II or someone who has just received patronage from Sunak, Starmer or Davy?
Neither. Wouldn’t have a House of Lords with appointed people in the first place. But if forced to choose, the distant ancestor since they are more independent from patronage.
I’d also disqualify anyone who goes through these promotional businesses. I notice this chap is recommended by the Saudis … I think enough said.
I thought that was just how it’s always worked ?