A by-election like no other

A by-election like no other

By Nyta Mann BBC News Online political correspondent

Tony Blair has cooled on Lords reform

You may not have noticed, but a by-election is currently raging at Westminster. Not of the kind parliament has ever seen before, though.

Members of the House of Lords are voting to replace one of the 92 hereditary peers left in place under the deal cut between the government and opposition to ease passage of New Labour's first-term reform of the upper chamber.

Labour embarked on its constitutional journey assuming that a fully reformed, significantly elected House was its final destination.

Since then, Tony Blair has gone ice-cold on the idea and MPs have shown themselves unable to make up their minds as to what kind of Lords they want.

I remain in the House of Lords to make sure that the present system is continually regarded as ridiculous

The seventh Earl of Onslow

The result is a chamber government critics say is made up of "Tony's cronies", wholly appointed except for - and this is the mortifying bit for the government - its remaining hereditary members.

One of those 92 survivors, the Viscount of Oxfuird, died last year.

The by-election contest, open to the hundreds of hereditary peers cast out of the Lords three years ago, is to fill the resulting vacancy; the electorate is the membership of the House of Lords.

Whoever wins will have the closest thing you can get to a democratic mandate in the second chamber.

"It's just embarrassing," groans a Labour whip in the Lords. "We're trying to pretend it isn't happening. It makes us look stupid and it's all our own fault."

Painful

The seventh Earl of Onslow, a Tory hereditary elected to remain in the Lords as one of the original 92, happily agrees: "There is an element of farce here, but only because they've let it be here."

Hereditary by-election timetable

7 March - candidates register for election back to the Lords

25 and 26 March - voting takes place

27 March - result announced

"I remain in the House of Lords to make sure that the present system is continually regarded as ridiculous," he declares.

"I'm in there because my forebears got pissed with Pitt and wallowed with Walpole. But if Tony Blair's embarrassed about it, he knows what to do!"

But with further Lords reform kicked way into the long grass, and 67 being the average age in the Lords compared to the newly youthful, post-1997 average Commons age of 48, the idiosyncratic poll under way among the most lofty electorate in the world could be the first of many - each a painful reminder for Labour of a manifesto pledge unmet.

It must not be allowed to happen, warns Lord Desai, Labour peer and disappointed backer of a fully-elected chamber.

"We have to make up our minds to stop this by-election and what it represents," he says.

"We never thought it would come to this, with this process actually being used. If we have to live with it this time round, we must make sure this is the last of these 'by-elections' to take place."

He may get his wish before too long. The former Commons speaker, Lord (Bernard) Weatherill, has introduced a private members' bill that would do away with the by-elections.

"This by-election makes us look silly but it may serve a purpose in concentrating minds on the issue," he predicts.

Appeal

His bill is still only in its earliest parliamentary stages but he has held talks with Lord Irvine, the lord chancellor, to appeal for support for the measure.

Did Lord Irvine promise government backing? Lord Weatherill won't say, "but my appeal wasn't turned down, put it that way".

The Joint Committee on Lords reform meets later this month to discuss what, if any, next steps can be taken following the House of Commons's shambolic failure to express a preference for any of the options offered it last month.

It too will consider what is to be done about the current provisions for hereditary peer by-elections.

The irony is that the government, by scrapping an uncomfortably comic by-product of its own unwillingness to follow through on its reform plans, will then face a new accusation: that it is abolishing the one element of democracy, albeit a highly eccentric one, to have made it to the House of Lords in centuries.