From Cromwell to Starmer: How Many Times Must We Kill the House of Lords?

From 1649 to 2026: Sir Keir Starmer’s Lords “Reform” Is a Patronage Machine

Yesterday, 18 March 2026, the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act received Royal Assent. The last 92 hereditary peers will lose their automatic right to sit and vote in Parliament. It is, by any reasonable measure, long overdue. It is also, by any honest measure, almost entirely beside the point.

Today is 19 March 2026. On this day in 1649, the Rump Parliament did what Labour leaders since Keir Hardie have only dared to whisper in manifestos: they abolished the House of Lords. They declared it “useless and dangerous to the people of England”.

Three hundred and seventy-seven years later, we find ourselves not in a republic of equals, but in a bloated warehouse of political patronage where the “useless” has become a career path and the “dangerous” has been replaced by the merely cynical.

Sir Keir Starmer, a man whose brand is built on the sturdy, if uninspiring, pillars of “rules” and “integrity,” has spent the last two years performing a remarkable constitutional conjuring trick. With one hand, he offers the public the long-awaited “modernisation” of the upper chamber; with the other, he stuffs its red benches with the very cronyism he once decried.

The Grand Illusion of Reform

Let us first establish what was promised. The Labour manifesto of 2024, that sacred text of election pledges, contained a raft of commitments on Lords reform: mandatory retirement for peers aged 80 or over, reform of the appointments process, new participation requirements, mechanisms to remove “disgraced members,” the complete abolition of hereditary peers, and steps towards “replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations”

This was not some overnight conversion. In 2022, the Commission on the UK’s Future, established by Starmer under Gordon Brown’s chairmanship, had recommended replacing the Lords with an elected “Assembly of the Nations and Regions.” Starmer duly pledged to abolish the House of Lords in the first term of a Labour government. It was a bold promise, the kind that stirs the blood of anyone who believes democracy should mean something.

Yet by the time the King’s Speech arrived in July 2024, those grand ambitions had been stripped back to a single, modest measure: the removal of the 92 remaining hereditary peers. The “immediate modernisation” had become a minimalist adjustment. The commitment to consult on a democratic alternative was kicked into the long grass, where such promises traditionally go to graze and eventually expire. In March 2026, the government finally moved to excise the hereditary peers, the “first step” in a reform journey that has, in truth, been stuck in the Westminster mud since 1911.

The Numbers of Patronage

The House of Lords now has 842 sitting members. It is a legislative leviathan, second in size only to the National People’s Congress of China. That is the institution Starmer called “indefensible.” That is the institution he has been enthusiastically enlarging.

Since taking office in July 2024, Starmer has appointed over 80 new peers. In December 2024 alone he waved through a batch of 34, then returned in December 2025 with a further 25 Labour loyalists, his largest single tranche, announced as a “strategic” measure to “balance” the chamber. Advisers, party staffers, regional councillors and political allies, all given seats for life in a legislature the Prime Minister has described as undemocratic. Each of them entitled to claim a tax-free attendance allowance of £361 a day simply for showing up, at a cost to the public purse running into tens of millions annually; this at a moment when the same government insists there is no money for the services working people actually depend upon.

The peer who came to Starmer’s rescue after a protester doused him in glitter at the 2023 Labour conference now sits in the upper house. His former Director of Strategy is there. His former Director of Communications is there too, though circumstances have since complicated that particular appointment considerably.

This is not a revising chamber. It is a retirement home for the political class, funded by a public told there is no money left for basic services.

THE DEAL BEHIND THE BILL

Even the passage of the Hereditary Peers Bill carries a price tag that should give democrats pause. To secure its safe passage, the government offered life peerages to opposition and crossbench members who would lose their seats when the hereditary principle was abolished. The Commons confirmed on 10 March 2026 that the government would provide “a number of life peerages” to the Official Opposition and to Crossbenchers as part of the arrangement.

Let us be precise about what happened here. The government abolished the hereditary principle by rewarding its opponents with the appointed principle. Peers who could no longer claim their seats by right of birth were invited to claim them instead by right of prime ministerial favour. It is the constitutional equivalent of abolishing a rotten borough by offering everyone who lived there a seat in a different rotten borough.

The logic is perfectly circular: the House is undemocratic, so we must appoint more undemocratic members to ensure our democratic will is not thwarted by the existing undemocratic members.

Starmer’s government tells us that nobody should sit in the House by virtue of an inherited title. He is right about that. But nobody should sit in the House by virtue of their loyalty to a political party, their willingness to donate to one, or their friendship with those in Downing Street. Those things are equally indefensible. The government simply does not say so.

Starmer abolished the hereditary principle with one hand. With the other, he handed out ermine to his press secretary.

THE ECHOES OF 1649

There is a bitter historical irony here that deserves attention. When the Commons abolished the Lords in 1649, they did so because the upper chamber had refused to pass legislation paving the way for the trial of Charles I. The Act declared the Lords “useless and dangerous” because they stood in the way of popular justice.

Yet even Oliver Cromwell, no friend to aristocracy, was reportedly “very violent” against abolition. He thought the Commons were “mad” to “incense all the Peers at such a time when they had more need to study a near union with them.” Cromwell’s preference was for retaining a second chamber, albeit in attenuated form, out of respect to his allies who sat there. When he eventually created the “Other House” in 1657, it was precisely because he wanted a check on the elected Commons, a body he found unruly, unpredictable, and insufficiently deferential to his authority.

The resonance with our present moment is uncomfortable. Starmer, like Cromwell, appears to have discovered the utility of an appointed chamber. It is useful for rewarding loyalists. It is useful for parking former MPs who lost their seats but retain their ambitions. It is useful for ensuring that the government’s legislative programme encounters minimal resistance from peers who owe their position entirely to the Prime Minister’s patronage. What Cromwell grasped in the seventeenth century, and what Starmer has quietly rediscovered in the twenty-first, is that an appointed second chamber is not an obstacle to executive power. It is an instrument of it.

THE DECEMBER DISASTER

Three of Starmer’s December 2025 appointments have already become scandals. Together, they illuminate something deeper than individual misjudgement: they expose the recklessness of a patronage system that answers to no one except the Prime Minister of the day.

Lord Matthew Doyle served as Starmer’s Downing Street Director of Communications until March 2025. He was made a peer in January 2026. By February, he had lost the Labour whip after The Sunday Times revealed that in 2017, while a councillor named Sean Morton was facing charges for possessing indecent images of children, Doyle had actively campaigned for him, travelling to Scotland to canvass support and wearing a “Re-elect Sean Morton” T-shirt. Morton later admitted the offence and was placed on the sex offender register.

At Prime Minister’s Questions on 11 February 2026, Starmer was forced to concede that Doyle “did not give a full account of his actions” before his appointment. Yet crucially, it emerged that senior Number 10 officials had been aware of Doyle’s links to Morton before the peerage was announced, and still the appointment proceeded. Doyle was ennobled as Baron Doyle of Great Barford on 8 January 2026, weeks after the Sunday Times story first broke.

Lord Joe Docherty of Milngavie was introduced to the Lords on 19 January 2026. By 28 February, the Sunday Times and FE Week had published an investigation revealing that Docherty had resigned as chief executive of NCG, formerly Newcastle College Group, in October 2018 after being confronted with allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct in the workplace. He had exchanged more than 50 sexual messages on the same day as an Ofsted inspection and, on one occasion, conducted a sexual liaison when he was scheduled to attend a meeting. The Labour Party suspended the whip pending investigation.

Baroness Ann Limb was nominated as an education expert and former chair of a City and Guilds charity. She announced she would not take her seat after The Sunday Times revealed she had lied about holding a PhD. Further reporting established that she had overseen the sale of a historic charity’s assets to a foreign buyer in a controversial transaction that produced seven-figure bonuses for two senior executives.

Three peers from a single appointment list: one linked to a convicted paedophile, one accused of serial inappropriate conduct in the workplace, one who fabricated her academic credentials. This is not bad luck. It is the predictable consequence of a system in which the vetting process is whatever the Prime Minister decides it is on the day. That is not a constitutional safeguard. It is a constitutional scandal.

The vetting process for the House of Lords is whatever the Prime Minister decides it is on the day. That is not a constitutional safeguard. It is a constitutional scandal.

This is not a revising chamber; it is a retirement home for the political class, funded by a public currently told there is “no money left” for basic services. When Labour promised to “replace the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber,” they spoke of the nations and regions. Instead, they have delivered the London-centric elite, gift-wrapped in ermine.

Each of these peers can claim a tax-free attendance allowance of £361 a day simply for showing up. The total annual cost to the public purse runs into the tens of millions of pounds. This at a moment when the same government insists there is no money for the services that working people actually depend upon.

An appointed chamber is not a reformed chamber. It is a chamber reformed to suit the person doing the appointing.

THE STANDARD OBJECTIONS

Those who defend the appointed chamber reach for the same arguments every time. An elected second chamber would create gridlock; it would challenge the primacy of the Commons; it would drive away expert appointees who would never submit to the indignity of a ballot.

These objections do not survive contact with evidence. The German Bundesrat represents the states and does not paralyse the Bundestag. The Australian Senate is fully elected and provides robust scrutiny without bringing the government to its knees. The Irish Seanad, imperfect as it is, at least attempts to represent vocational and educational constituencies rather than political loyalists. The terror of gridlock is really the terror of accountability: the dread that a government accustomed to passing legislation through a whipped Commons might have to persuade a chamber that owes it nothing.

The expertise argument is more revealing still. It rests on the assumption that wisdom and democratic legitimacy are mutually exclusive; that the scientist, the nurse or the lawyer who submits herself to the verdict of voters somehow becomes less expert upon receiving a mandate. This is not a constitutional argument. It is a class prejudice dressed up as one. It says, in effect, that the people cannot be trusted to choose those who govern them. It is the doctrine of every oligarchy that has ever needed a polite reason to remain in power.

A YouGov poll conducted for the UCL Constitution Unit in June 2025 found that a mere 3 per cent of the public supported simply removing the hereditary peers without further reform. Fifty-six per cent wanted hereditary removal combined with strict limits on prime ministerial appointments. The public, in other words, understood the problem precisely. The government heard them and did the 3 per cent option anyway.

WHAT REFORM ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

The Labour peer Baroness Bryan of Partick has stated plainly that it is impossible to ignore the serious democratic deficits of the unelected chamber. She is right. Any foreign country whose legislature contained hereditary members, reserved seats for an established church, and massive overrepresentation of a single region would face international criticism. We tell ourselves our peculiar institutions are exempt from such scrutiny. We are wrong.

A democratic second chamber is not a radical proposition. It is what most functioning democracies already have. It would represent the nations and regions of the United Kingdom in a way that an appointed chamber, overwhelmingly drawn from London and the south-east, never can. It would give the people of Tyneside and Swansea and Glasgow a genuine stake in the second stage of their own legislation. It would end the spectacle of a Prime Minister awarding lifelong legislative seats to the people who ran his press office.

The Gordon Brown Commission, which Starmer himself established in 2022 and used as the intellectual basis for his abolition pledge, recommended an elected “Assembly of the Nations and Regions” as the Lords’ replacement. That recommendation sits, untouched, in whatever filing cabinet holds the things this government once promised to do but found inconvenient to deliver.

The test of any reform is not whether it removes something bad. It is whether it replaces the bad thing with something better, or simply with a different bad thing that happens to suit the reformers. Starmer has removed the hereditary element. He has not replaced it with democracy. He has replaced it with himself.

Three hundred and seventy-seven years after the Commons declared the Lords useless and dangerous, a Labour Prime Minister has made it useful and safe. Useful to him. Safe from scrutiny.

THE LONG BETRAYAL

The Levellers, in the 1640s, argued that no man should hold power over another man’s life and liberty without that other man’s consent. Keir Hardie argued it at the turn of the twentieth century. Tony Benn argued it through the latter half of that century. The English radical tradition has been consistent on this point for four hundred years. Those who hold legislative power must be accountable to those over whom they legislate.

Starmer’s Labour paid its respects to that tradition when in opposition. It quoted it. It cited it. It used it to justify the boldest Lords reform pledge Labour had made in a generation. In government, it has discovered that an unelected, appointed chamber is actually rather useful. It can be stocked with loyal allies. It can be used to pass legislation. It cannot vote Starmer out of office. From the perspective of a Prime Minister who once described the Lords as indefensible, this represents a remarkable change of view.

Starmer has made it useful and safe. Useful to him. Safe from scrutiny.

The Hereditary Peers Act is not nothing. It closes a relic that should have been closed in 1911, or 1949, or 1999. But it is a door being shut on an empty room. The real power, the power to stuff the upper chamber with loyalists and patronage appointments, to reward the people who waved off protesters at your conference and ran your communications operation, to hand a lifelong legislative seat to a former press secretary: that power remains entirely intact. It has not been reformed. It has been liberated from its most embarrassing neighbour.

If we are to be a serious nation, we must stop asking how many times we must kill the House of Lords and finally start the work of burying it. The era of the “Lords” must end; the era of the people is three centuries overdue.

The Lords are not dying. They are merely changing their clothes. Until we elect them, we are not reforming Parliament. We are redecorating it...

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