An earlier blogpost in June outlined my objections to this rotten and corrupt apology for a legislative chamber, and my proposals for its replacement. (If you haven't read it yet, please do, and please comment on it.) The prime minister's list of appointments is in line with favouritism of most of his predecessors: consolation prizes for the superannuated ; shameless paybacks to millionaire supporters. Undisguised nepotism: well, that is perhaps a new low, and there has to be a pretty big consolation prize for being the prime minister's sibling. And of course Sir Ian Botham had to be rewarded for his extremely perceptive and original comments on the EU. And of course there had to be at least one Russian oligarch, because that is one kind of immigrant who will always be welcome, a 'nowhere' person, who, because money talks, is always very much 'somewhere'. And, 'Bob's your uncle' (quite literally, because the term originates in Lord Salisbury's, -or Robert Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil's- tendency to dole out Cabinet posts to his needy relatives) there you have a list of the 'best and brightest' of Britain, the stellar eminencies of our glorious post-Brexit sulit uplands. Is there any self-respecting adult who would succumb to such a charade ? Well, over 800, obviously. And quite a number of those just want the gong, and have no intention of making any contribution, and many of those who would like to make a contribution are not able to. This is not an ageist remark ; just an observation on the inevitable course of human life. As Chris Patten put it, much more elegantly than I ever could: 'These days, as a member of the House of Lords, the Elysian fields of the British Constitution, I do not feel threatened by anything except the voluminous evidence of the imminence of mortality.' ('First confession: a sort of memoir' (2017), page 281).
Of course, this abuse may be part of Dominic Cummings' plan for 'creative destruction' of the British Constitution. The constitution is a delicate, ethereal, mysterious flower, in several places, but in none, at the same time. Treat the House of Lords with enough disrespect and it will become even less effective as a chamber which checks and balances the House of Commons. This is of a piece with the government's plans for judicial review, its revenge for the Supreme Court having had the temerity to challenge its proroguing of Parliament. All this, and so much else in the kakistocracy's behaviour, is straight out of Viktor Orban's playbook.