At a recent reception in the House of Lords … who would want to be one of the ten or more ‘lords a-leaping’ in recent resignation honours lists?
Patrick Comerford
Today is the Tenth Day of Christmas (3 January 2024). Before today begins, I am taking some time for reading, reflection and prayer.
My reflections each morning during the ‘12 Days of Christmas’ are following this pattern:
1, A reflection on a verse from the popular Christmas song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’;
2, the Gospel reading of the day;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
‘On the Tenth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me … ten lords a-leaping’
Today is the Tenth Day of Christmas (3 January). But, in liturgical terms, Christmas is a 40-day season that continues until Candlemas or the Feast of the Presentation (2 February).
The tenth verse of the traditional song, ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, is:
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me …
Ten lords a-leaping,
nine ladies dancing,
eight maids-a-milking,
seven swans-a-swimming,
six geese-a-laying,
five golden rings,
four colly birds,
three French hens,
two turtle doves
and a partridge in a pear tree.
The Christian interpretation of this song often sees the ‘ten lords a-leaping’ as figurative representations of the Ten Commandments.
Twenty-six bishops of the Church of England sit in the House of Lords: the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York, the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, and the next 21 most senior diocesan bishops, with the exception of the Bishop in Europe and the Bishop of Sodor and Man.
But, among the other members of the House of Lord, what do ‘ten lords a-leaping’ actually look like as they leap over democratic processes and ethical standards?
In a mere space of three years, Boris Johnson made appointed 10 per cent of the House of Lords, appointing 86 new peers to a house that has more than 800 members, and then added an unusually large number of peers in his resignation honours. His list further enlarged a chamber that is second only in size to the Chinese National People’s Congress.
Now Liz Truss has just handed out peerages and top gongs to her financial backers and supporters of her short and disastrous 49 days as Prime Minister. Her critics have branded her selection as ‘the lettuce list’, and say it is the biggest honours scandal since the ‘lavender list’ approved by Labour PM Harold Wilson in 1976. Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government, told the BBC that the Truss resignation honours had brought the whole system into disrepute.
The Lord Speaker, Lord McFall, complained that recent political appointees to the Lords ‘have not been especially active’. This harms the reputation of the Lords, reinforcing the strong element of cronyism in such appointments – an opportunity to reward financial contributions to a political party, personal loyalty or political support from newspaper editors or proprietors, for example.
These two former prime ministers have selected some of their closest allies to become Lords. Here are some of the ten Lords (and Ladies) a-leaping they have helped to leap-frog into the Upper House:
1, Matthew Elliott was the chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign. At the time, the
Guardian described him as a central figure in ‘a network of opaquely funded organisations.’ He also sought closer links with Putin’s Russia as a founding member of Conservative Friends of Russia. His wife Sarah, who now become Lady Elliott, has close links to Donald Trump as chairwoman of Republicans Overseas UK, which hosted an inauguration event for Trump on 30 January 2017. In July 2018, an investigation by the Electoral Commission said Elliott’s campaign had broken electoral law. Elliott denied this, and in September 2018 the High Court agreed that Elliott’s campaign had broken the law, but ruled that the Electoral Commission had ‘misinterpreted’ the electoral law in relation to Vote Leave in advice it gave.
2, The pro-Brexit Tory donor Jonathan Patrick Moynihan is another Truss-nominated peer. Yet Moynihan’s advice to Truss may have been her downfall. He was against the view that a budget could not be produced without an accompanying OBR commentary. This omission was one of the causes of the failure of the Truss and Kwarteng budget in September 2022. Sir Jacob Ree-Mogg says he ‘strongly deserved’ his peerage, and said: ‘Honours have long oiled our political system and cost nothing, so it is hard to see what the harm is except it upsets the po-faced puritans.’ Moynihan certainly knows how to oil the political system – he donated £20,000 to Truss’s leadership campaign in 2022, and £100,000 to Johnson’s leadership campaign in 2019.
3, Ruth Oates Porter, who was also given a peerage, is a close aide of Liz Truss. She failed to get elected even to a local council when she stood as the Conservative candidate for Richmond upon Thames London Borough Council in 2022. But now she is going to sit in the House of Lords for life because she spent a few short weeks in Downing Street as the Deputy Chief of Staff from September to October 2022.
4, Peter Cruddas is a major Conservative donor and former co-treasurer. In giving him a peerage, Johnson overruled the recommendation of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, which vets all party political and crossbench nominations. The commission advised Johnson that it ‘could not support’ the nomination, but Johnson decided that ‘exceptionally, the nomination should proceed.’ Johnson said Cruddas had made ‘outstanding contributions’ to the business and charitable sectors – with the Tories one of the biggest of those businesses or charities. It was later reported that he donated £500,000 to the Conservative Party only days after being sent to the House of Lords. In all, it is said, he has donated over £3 million to the party.
5, Ross Kempsell was only 30 when Johnson made him a life peer. He once worked for Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV station as political editor, when he interviewed Johnson in No 10. It was a bizarre interview in which Johnson claimed he made model buses in his spare time. Kempsell. He also worked at Murdoch’s new station, Times Radio, joining Conservative Campaign HQ as a political director.
6, Charlotte Owen was one of Johnson’s former assistants and at 29 she became the youngest-ever life peers. She was in politics for 5½ years, with a series of backroom political jobs with Johnson and Liz Truss, and she went from intern to baroness in that time.
7, Dan Rosenfield was the Downing Street chief of staff for 13 months in 2020-2021 but left Tory MPs called for Johnson to reset his cabinet after the ‘Partygate’ scandal. At Downing Street, he was implicated in a potential lobbying scandal in relation to the proposed European Super League of major football clubs. The
Times reported he attended a Christmas party in 2020 in the office of Simon Case, head of the Civil Service, when Covid-19 restrictions forbade those gatherings. Reports say he presided over a ‘lad’ culture at Downing Street that excluded female members of staff.
8, Shaun Bailey tried but failed to become London mayor. He quit as chair of the London assembly police and crime committee after a photograph showed him breaking Covid rules at a lockdown party in CCHQ. During his career, he has been accused of Islamophobia and once shared a tweet with an image with a caption describing Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, as the ‘mad mullah of Londonistan’.
9, Cleveland Anthony Sewell was made a life peer in 2022. Among many generalisations, he has claimed that boys are being failed by schools because lessons have become too ‘feminised’ and he once wrote a column in the
Voice in which he said: ‘We heteros are sick and tired of tortured queens playing hide and seek around their closets. Homosexuals are the greatest queer-bashers around. No other group of people are so preoccupied with making their own sexuality look dirty.’
10, Angela Bray, who was also made a life peer by Boris Johnson in 2022, was MP for Ealing Central and Action when she was sacked as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in 2012 after she voted against a coalition government Bill on reforming the House of Lords. I wonder how she would then have answered the question: ‘Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?’
Bishops in the House of Lords … ‘On the Tenth Day of Christmas … ten lords-a-leaping’ (Photograph: UK Parliament TV; Open Government Licence)
Obviously, it is difficult to decide which one among these ten is more deserving than the others. And they were such deserving lists, I found it hard to select these ten from so many other lords-a-leaping.
At one time I used to think charitably, perhaps naively, that Jeffrey Archer was an exception rather a robust example of Tory life peers. Now, instead, I find I can go on and on.
Baroness Mone is no longer a member of the Conservative Party, but the Tories made her a life peer. Her husband’s company, PPE Medpro was awarded £200 million in Government contracts to provide PPE. The company made a profit of £60 million, but a great proportion of the products it provided was defective and went unused. Mone consistently and emphatically denied she was involved with PPE Medpro – that is until last month, when she told the BBC the lies to the press were to protect her family. Her company MJM lost an unfair dismissal case after she authorised the electronic bugging of the office of a former operations director, she has falsely claimed the efficacy of tablets sold by one of her companies had been proven in clinical trials. Her first vote in the House of Lords was against a motion to delay government cuts to tax credits of around £1,300 a year for three million low-income families.
Ben Houchen is another Johnson nominee to the Lords, the Tees Valley mayor. He was accused of ‘pork barrel politics’ in the run-up to the Hartlepool by-election in 2021. He was one of the figures responsible in 2021 for the controversial demolition of the landmark Dorman Long Tower despite it having Grade II listing. Houchen was criticised earlier this year when after it emerged that a 90 per cent stake in the company that operates the vacant Redcar steelworks site, teesworks, was transferred to two local developers without any public tender process. The developers received at least £45 million in dividends from the project despite no evidence that they had invested any of their own money in the project.
Stewart James Jackson, who became a life peer in 2022, was involved with Nadine Dorries and other right-wing MPs in forming up the Conservative Voice group led by David Davis and Liam Fox. He has opposed legislation on same-sex marriage, and accused David Cameron of being ‘arrogant’ for pressing ahead with it. After losing his seat in 2017, Jackson contacted a former constituent who had been critical of him on Facebook to call him a ‘thick chav’ and threatened him: ‘If you print any shit about me on Facebook in the future you will regret it.’ Jackson has often tried to remove details on Wikipedia of his parliamentary expenses scandal and his insults to a lesbian constituent.
Johnson nominees who never made it the House of Lords included the former culture secretary Nadine Dorries. The government reportedly rejected her nomination at the last minute to avert the possibility of a disastrous by-election. Nadine Dorries made repetitive defences of Johnson when he was embroiled in scandal. Even after he resigned, she has used Twitter to continue to praise his efforts to secure a large Conservative majority. When she eventually resigned after failing to make it into the Lords and created that disastrous by-election, it truly was a case of throwing the rattle out of the pram.
Are the hereditary lords a-leaping any more credible?
Charles Henry John Benedict Crofton Chetwynd Chetwynd-Talbot sounds eminently respectable among the hereditary peers. He is 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury, 22nd Earl of Waterford, 7th Earl Talbot, Viscount Ingestre, Baron Talbot, hereditary Lord High Steward of Ireland, High Steward of Sheffield Cathedral, and the premier earl in the Peerage of England and the Peerage of Ireland. He is one of the 92 hereditary peers elected to sit in the Lords, and he has also been a Tory whip. In the past, he has sold off alluring but meaningless titles such as of Deputy Lord High Steward of Ireland or the
Barony of Dungarvan.
In 2022, the Conduct Committee recommended his suspension from the House of Lords for nine months for financial misconduct following his involvement with SpectrumX, a healthcare firm that paid him £3,000 a month. As a consequence, he could not play his customary role as the hereditary Lord High Steward of Ireland at the coronation of King Charles III, and the Conservative whip was removed.
Many people who I might agree with on many other issues are strongly critical of the right of some bishops to set in the House of Lords. The debate about the disestablishment of the Church of England is a separate matter. But religious figures, including, undoubtedly, the late Chief Rabbi Lord (Jonathan) Sacks, provide the Lords with a moral voice that appears to be distinctly in short supply among many of the people whose names rise to the top of the resignation honours list of the immediate past Prime Ministers.
Indeed, discussing the Lords Spiritual deflects from the real discussion about the nepotism and corruption surrounding the present system that allows failed and convicted Prime Ministers who hold office for a few short years, even a few short weeks, to reward their donors and sycophants with the right to sit in parliament for the rest of their natural lives. The House of Lords needs a change of name, a clean-out, a root and branch reform, and the abolition of the right to of failed prime ministers to pack the upper house with their financial backers and croneys.
‘Ten lords a-leaping’ … the Ten Commandments on two panels in Saint Carthage’s Cathedral, Lismore, Co Waterford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
John 1: 29-34 (NRSVA):
29 The next day he [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” 31 I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.’ 32 And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. 33 I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” 34 And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’
Saint John the Baptist (right) with the Virgin Mary and Christ in a stained glass window in Saint Mary’s Church (The Hub), Lichfield (see John 1: 29-34) (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 3 January 2024):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Looking to 2024 – Freedom in Christ.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by the Revd Duncan Dormor, USPG General Secretary.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (3 January 2024) invites us to pray in these words:
Thank you for our salvation in Christ, and thank you Father, for the freedom we have in him. We pray that we walk with love and care on God’s earth, and vital awareness of God’s comprehensive vision and purpose for our lives.
The Collect:
Almighty God,
who wonderfully created us in your own image
and yet more wonderfully restored us
through your Son Jesus Christ:
grant that, as he came to share in our humanity,
so we may share the life of his divinity;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Heavenly Father,
whose blessed Son shared at Nazareth the life of an earthly home:
help your Church to live as one family,
united in love and obedience,
and bring us all at last to our home in heaven;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
God in Trinity,
eternal unity of perfect love:
gather the nations to be one family,
and draw us into your holy life
through the birth of Emmanuel,
our Lord Jesus Christ.
Yesterday’s Reflection
Continued Tomorrow
‘Ten Lords a-Leaping … the Ten Commandments on a Torah Mantle on Torah Scrolls from Adelaide Road Synagogue now in the Dublin Jewish Museum (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Scripture quotations are from the
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
http://nrsvbibles.org
