House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a joy to follow a couple of Earls, except possibly into battle. It was a great pleasure to hail the noble Lord, Lord Brady of Altrincham, and bid farewell to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin. I enjoyed both their speeches very much.

I spoke at length in the debate on the reform of the House of Lords, so I will stick to the Bill. At first reading, I was reminded of the words of the popular music group Bananarama when they sang

“Na na na na


Na na na na

Hey hey hey

Goodbye”,

for is a very simple Bill, somewhat terminal for some of us. I was tempted to draft an amendment adding the words “except for my friends and me”, but I did not think that the Public Bill Office would wear that one.

We have a problem: people like their hereditaries. We are house-trained, hard-working—we turn up. Considering this problem, I had one of those lovely conversations you have in the House of Lords. Walking down the corridor, I met a Peeress whom I knew by sight, and we got talking. We started talking about the hereditary peerage and she said, “The problem is, you have to separate principle from the people”. That is what we have to do here. How do we separate the emotion from the legislation?

As ever, we can learn from the American military. In his very fine book, “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, Jon Ronson talks about how American special forces trained. They had a kennel of dogs; they would take a dog, shoot it with a bolt gun, then train one of their men to give it a wound dressing as if it had been shot. The trouble was that, after a while, people got too attached to the dogs and could not do it. After a lot of experimentation, the American military discovered that no human can form an attachment to a goat, so the Americans now train on goats. Noble Lords need to start thinking of the hereditary Peers as goats.

My father served in your Lordships’ House for 25 years, retiring in 1999, when the House was dominated by hereditary Peers with perhaps a less diligent approach to turning up. When he was asked whether it worked, he tended to say, “Yeah, pretty well. The only time it gets weird is when there are debates on horseracing or fly-fishing and suddenly you get groups of men around the place who have no idea where the lavatories are””

When this is all over and the hereditaries have been moved out of the House, if noble Lords ever think of me, I hope they will think of me sitting quietly at home with my wife, with the butler ironing my copy of the Times Educational Supplement—or perhaps on a crisp morning riding to hounds on Hackney marshes. If they think of me at all, I hope they will think, “Ah, Hampton—he knew where the lavatories were”.