House of Lords Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall omit the conventional opening compliments to the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham, but even if they are unsaid they remain heartfelt. We now have a Prime Minister who is a historian and who has borrowed an earlier 19th-century title for his Administration. The Ministry of All the Talents served for 13 months between February 1806 and March 1807. By superstition, 13 is an ill fated number, but in this instance it may be a calendar pointer to coming events. Although that Administration’s most talented figure, Charles James Fox, was dead within seven of those months, happily no similar omen should be read into that fact, for Fox had specifically declined to be First Lord of the Treasury at the inception of the Government. What is an echo of that era, however, is that the ministry initially consisted of three Earls, a Viscount and three Barons, assisted by five Ministers in the Commons, one of whom, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was the son of a Peer. That imbalance was further distorted when Fox died and he was replaced by his kinsman Lord Holland in your Lordships’ House. I notice that our historian Prime Minister has read his history and created three new peerages to help to give his ministry the sobriquet of two centuries ago by an instrument of creation still, happily, available to him. The Bill is the living embodiment of the proverb, ““A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush””. As the speakers list shows, it is the epitome of a cross-party measure and is, in that respect, an index of good intent. It also possesses that most excellent of British virtues in being an exercise in gradualism. We are seeking to help the nation to cross a river, stone by steady and sturdy stone, without taking a cold bath in the process. Cold baths are invigorating but hazardous both for Governments and for constitutions. Pouring cold water on a constitution is never regarded as a compliment. Fabius Maximus Cunctator was one of the heroes of ancient Rome, a harbinger of that great republic whose administrative logic could be comprehensibly derived, one classical scholar has pointed out, from the logic of the single construction of ““ut”” with the subjunctive. I understand that that ancient hero has more recently given his name to a society dedicated to the virtues of gradualism. The Bill has four other virtues. It does not require a referendum; it underlines both the advantages of and the need for transitional arrangements; to borrow the patois of 1910, it is couched in the language of hedgers, not of ditchers; and it improves the chances of a statutory appointments commission being afforded to us long before we get a Civil Service Act.