House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly address Amendment 1 and will ask a couple of specific questions related to the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain.

First, in closing, can the noble Baroness the Leader of the House please confirm what discussions she might have had to confirm that their ceremonial roles will remain wholly unchanged following the passage of the Bill? As the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, stated, we owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their remarkable service during the recent succession of King Charles III.

Secondly, has anyone either proposing or opposing this amendment actually consulted with the present holders of these two high offices of state? I spoke this morning with the Earl Marshal; he was happy for me to confirm to the House that he insists upon his continued service in the role of Earl Marshal but does not think that a seat in this House should be reserved for his hereditary self. Perhaps it could be made available to someone of a more diverse background, he suggested. For hereditaries, our time, unfortunately, is up. We should perhaps accept that and go gracefully, albeit a bit reluctantly.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I put my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, and I did so because although it seems like a small point, it is part of a bigger point.

I am afraid the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, is mistaken in thinking that the Lord Great Chamberlain is here because of his ceremonial duties; it is quite the other way around. The ceremonial duties have emerged over time from the fundamental duties of the Lord Great Chamberlain, who—this is a very practical point about this amendment—has a great many practical duties.

Those duties include: the organisation of great occasions within Westminster Hall; joint responsibility for the control of Westminster Hall and the crypt chapel; the organisation when important Heads of State visit, such as President Macron next week; the sole responsibility for the monarch’s Robing Room, staircase, anteroom and the Royal Gallery; the ballot for the State Opening, which requires a certain amount of tact in its management; and correspondence with individuals and organisations relating to the Palace of Westminster. Those are all practical things. We need to ask ourselves whether, if the Lord Great Chamberlain were to be removed from this place, they would be so well accomplished. If they would not be so well accomplished, what other possible advantage could there be in removing them?

It is true that the Earl Marshal’s role is much more purely ceremonial; I will come back to that in a moment.

It should be obvious that the performance of these tasks is best fulfilled by a full Member of your Lordships’ House. The Lord Great Chamberlain needs to know the people here: our hopes and fears, our conventions, rules and traditions, and, of course, our quirks. It is very nice and encouraging that the present Lord Great Chamberlain is often visible in this Chamber, observing the habits of the tribe of which he is a member. I do not see how it could be done better any other way. If he cannot sit here, it is inevitable that his personal knowledge of the place will decline and, of course, his successor will have no such personal knowledge.

I very much endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said about the restoration and renewal project. It is a very complicated project, and it is important that the Lord Great Chamberlain is able to do his job in representing the interests of the monarch on these matters. In doing so, he needs to understand what we all think, so that he can say something which reflects reality. His fundamental role is to maintain the crucial and historic link between the monarchy and Parliament. I think we can trust him when he represents the monarch’s interests here, because he is one of us; we can feel, if you like, that we have a friend at court. So what good comes of fraying that link?

On the role of the Earl Marshal, most of the points made about our connection with the monarchy apply to him as well. But I just want to mention something else, because this is not the first time that the Earls Marshal has been removed from this House, and it is quite interesting what actually happened—it tells us something. As is well known, the Dukes of Norfolk are hereditarily almost always Roman Catholics, and as such, they continued to hold their place under tolerant monarchs in the past. But Parliament was not so tolerant, and from 1672 until 1824, the Dukes of Norfolk were excluded from this House but continued to be Earls Marshal. This created considerable inconvenience in which they had to create deputy Earls Marshal to do the necessary work here, and they got around it in the rather traditional way of the aristocracy, particularly in those days, by appointing their Protestant cousins to the post.

In 1824, a Bill was brought in to change that and allow the Catholic Norfolks to come back into this House. It was a rather important Bill in the history of this country, because it was the forerunner of the Catholic emancipation Act, which, thanks to the ancestor of the noble Duke who is sitting beside me—who rather surprisingly took a very modernising view and said he would resign if it did not get through—Catholic emancipation came in, and so did a whole series of emancipations in the 19th century, which changed the franchise, the qualifications for university and for all sorts of public roles, and so on. So it is rather important.

I was slightly sorry to hear the noble Earl, Lord Devon, quoting the current Earl Marshal saying that more diversity should be encouraged, because, actually, the Norfolks brought great diversity in the 19th century. They were the Catholic voice in this House at a time when it was virtually not allowed. Is it not rather strange that, in this 21st century, when we talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion, we are now trying to kick out the Roman Catholic Norfolks from this Parliament and narrow in some sense the work that we are doing?