Who cares about the House of Lords? Not many people, and that’s the problem. Ever since Gilbert and Sullivan wrote Iolanthe in 1882, the upper chamber has been lampooned, and for a certain kind of politician the flummery is not merely quaint but obnoxious. Tony Blair took his scissors to the Lord Chancellor’s wig and tights, as part a modernising campaign that culminated in the House of Lords Act 1999, intended to expel the hereditary peers. A brilliant rearguard action led by the present Marquess of Salisbury meant he was unable to complete the job and compelled to leave a rump of 92. No doubt Sir Keir Starmer, now prime minister, sees this as unfinished business, since, on opening parliament, the current monarch Charles III had to announce their imminent defenestration. The trouble is that it will do nothing to address the main problems of the Upper House. Arguably, it will make them worse.

Strangely, I was able to discuss this with soon-to-be-Prime Minister Blair before the 1997 general election. In that era of Big Tentism, even the editor of Country Life, as I then was, could get a spot with him. In a pair of shiny new wellington boots, he had been to a farm somewhere outside London and the interview took place in the rear of the car that drove us back. Due to traffic jams, I had longer than expected, which gave me acres of time to raise matters that were of burning importance to our readers – some of them titled – if not, alas, the public at large. Mightn’t his reform, by removing the hereditaries, make the Lords worse rather than better? The hereditaries introduced a random element of a sort. They had interests that were not well represented in the House of Commons, particularly the countryside (because they owned large chunks of it) and the armed forces. Both, as it happens, were to loom large during the Blair years, due to the appallingly mismanaged Foot and Mouth crisis of 2001 and the second Iraq war: advice on both would have been helpful. Above all, they were not appointed by prime ministerial fiat. The life peers are overwhelmingly politicos and placemen.

Blair looked at me as though I’d come from outer space. In his world, hereditary privilege was such a self-evident evil that no sane human being could defend the existing system. As things turned out, the 92 would soon become the only elected part of the chamber, having been chosen as representatives by a vote of all the hereditaries. Admittedly, this electorate was a narrow one, but it was an electorate nonetheless. Blair made matters worse for the composition of the upper house by insisting that the political complexion of the Lords should reflect that of the Commons. Until then there had been a heavy Conservative bias, which the reforming New Labour government naturally found intolerable. So, a whole swathe of new peers was appointed. This caused two problems. Not only was the talent thinly spread, but the principle that the governing party should always rule the roost stored up an obvious difficulty for the future. It meant that more and more peers would be created every time the government changed. In the entire course of her long reign, Elizabeth I created 23 new peers. During his decade as prime minister, Blair appointed 357. This meant that David Cameron had to make 243, a smaller total number but a higher yearly average (about 40 as opposed to 38). As a result, the membership of the House of Lords has ballooned to a point where not all 789 of them could find a seat if they turned up at the same time.

Blair may have expected his reforms to be the first step in a process. The sheer absurdity of the system created in 1999 would mean that some future prime minister would have to shake it up properly in the future. Or so he might have hoped. Yet as I found when writing Inside the House of Lords, with the photographer Derry Moore (aka the Earl of Drogheda), in 1997, this is unlikely to happen. Put 12 people in a room to decide what form the new House should take and you are likely to get 13 different answers. As it stands, the Lords has little power, having been neutered by the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 – look at its failure to defeat Brexit – but an elected House might feel it had the legitimacy to challenge the Commons. This would bring all the perils of stalemate between Congress and Senate seen in the US. Besides, which prime minster would devote the necessary parliamentary time – possibly much of a whole term – to a matter so low on the public’s list of priorities? Or voluntarily give up the power of patronage? No chance of rewarding cronies such as Boris Johnson’s 27-year old appointee Charlotte Owen or big party donors, who are too numerous to mention, if they did. Or of getting duffers out of the House of Commons to free up safe seats.

Expelling the 92 – or 90 if the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain are kept for their ceremonial roles – will help reduce numbers in the short term, but this is not enough. Starmer has proposed a retirement age, by which peers would be forced to hang up their ermine robes when reaching 80. This might strike some Democrats as a good rule for US presidents, solving the Biden problem, but seems impractical here, given the provisions of the Equality Act, forbidding discrimination on grounds of age. Anyway, Margaret Beckett is tipped for a peerage in the dissolution honours and she is 81. To lose the wisdom of, for example, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont (82) would diminish the House. As the IVF scientist Lord Winston (83) observes: ‘There are a number of lords, particularly the judges who are producing formidable arguments on government legislation, well into their 80s.’

Clearly something has to be done, but what? True to their creed of service, the hereditaries, it seems to me, have provided the answer. When needing to reduce their own number, they set up a vote of their whole body to choose the best. Couldn’t this example be followed by the lifers too? Let us begin by establishing the ideal number of peers. There are 650 members of the House of Commons, besides which the Lords already looks bloated. But MPs serve constituencies, so inevitably there will be a lot of them. This argument does not apply to the Lords. I don’t want to emulate Goneril and Regan when reducing the retinue of their father King Lear, whittled down from 100 to a single fool, but the US seems to manage with a Senate of only 100. A smaller House would be more efficient; its members would have more kudos. The existing members could still use their titles when booking restaurants. They would also continue to play a role in our democratic process by determining which of the streamlined number of peers would continue to occupy the red benches. This would be a simple and effective reform that would cost a minimal amount of money – in fact it would represent a considerable saving, given that many hundreds of peers would no longer collect their attendance allowance. The remaining peers would no longer be compelled to share offices. They might even be allowed proper levels of secretarial support. I commend this measure to the House.