Policy memo to the Prime Minister, re House of Lords reform: have you thought about offering peerages to Jeremy Paxman and the Dimblebys? Please don’t laugh, at least not until I have explained.
Labour has got itself into a mess over the future of the House of Lords. It knows what it doesn’t want (Etonian toffs) but not what it does want. The departing dukes, marquesses, earls, countesses and viscounts are going to leave quite a crater. It will not just be the sheer weight of numbers, but also the loss of spectacle. Snobbish as it might seem, the ancient titles and drawling accents lend the Lords a resonance. The new House of Senators, if it is called that, is going to need glamour to capture the public’s imagination.
We have perhaps the most disputatious and eloquent media elite of any country in the world. Our polemicists and correspondents are highly fluent in political life, often far more so than the average MP. Senior journalists are usually on dinner-party terms with cabinet ministers, judges and captains of commerce. And in the past 25 years the quality of people entering journalism has risen. Where once it attracted mavericks, the media now lures some of the best graduates.
Yet while pop stars, footballers and actors often show a commitment to good works – an ex-Spice Girl will throw herself into third-world relief – Fleet Street’s finest demonstrate little sense of public service. They are less imbued with a sense of citizenship than, for instance, American journalists.
With the exception of one or two grandees such as Simon Jenkins, they are rarely asked to serve on royal commissions or quangos. A handful, including the former editor of this magazine, become college professors, but too often there is a view that you have failed unless you go on hammering out copy until your final day, hitting another deadline, concocting another ephemeral “why, oh why?” piece for the Mail or the Express. When hacks start doing public work it can mean only one thing, we think: the freelancing has dried up.
One argument has it that no self-respecting journalist accepts public honours. It is certainly hard to see the Today programme’s ascetic maestros pocketing so much as a free biscuit from Tony Blair, but others might prove more amenable to the idea, particularly if the peerages offered were cross-bench seats.
Journalists have recently started to arrive in smallish numbers in the Commons. The Blairite Labour MPs Martin Linton and Yvette Cooper used to write for the Guardian and Independent respectively. Exeter’s Ben Bradshaw formerly worked for the BBC, while the Tory MP Julie Kirkbride wrote for the Telegraph. Martin Bell, the ex-BBC war reporter and now independent MP for Tatton, has proved himself one of the most accomplished performers in the Commons. With a few more journo-parliamentarians, who knows, the government might get a harder time on its stalling of a freedom of information bill.
Media peerages in the past have tended to go to press “barons” – the Beaverbrooks, Berrys and Rothermeres – or to journalists nearing the end of their careers, from the late Lord Cudlipp to the ex-Daily Telegraph editor Lord Deedes and the Times‘s Lord Rees-Mogg. Peerages have traditionally gone to the top architects, doctors, lawyers (masses of them), trade unionists, soldiers and financiers, but journalism, now one of the prime occupations, has been under-represented.
The few media peers already in existence do make an impact. One of the best afternoons at Westminster in recent months was the Lords debate on the future of the BBC, when impressive contributions came from Lord Hussey, a former BBC chairman, Lord (Melvyn) Bragg and Lady James, better known as the thriller writer and former BBC governor P D James. Imagine if Lords Paxman and Naughtie had also been able to join that debate, perhaps alongside Lady Forgan and Lady Adie, or even Lord (Kelvin) MacKenzie of Currant Bun.
Who else? Ex-editors such as Andrew Marr, Andrew Neil and Andreas Whittam Smith possess intellects that parliament could surely use. Max Hastings, editor of London’s Evening Standard, and the Telegraph‘s defence editor John Keegan know more about military history than the combined platoons of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The Guardian‘s Polly Toynbee has a profound knowledge of the social services. The BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, could give the upper house a far more detailed, informative speech about Serbia than he can in his brief few sound-bites on the Nine o’Clock News. And wouldn’t it be fun to have Brian Sewell in ermine?
Francis Wheen, Richard Littlejohn and Peter Hitchens would ensure that no one in the new House went to sleep. How about Joan Bakewell, maybe as the first Lady Spiritual? Media peers might also include the political biographer Tony Howard, recently retired from the Times, the BBC veterans Charles Wheeler and John Cole, and the Whitehall watcher Peter Hennessy. Here are journalists who are assured enough of their pre-eminence not to be compromised by accepting a peerage.
The only problem for Blair might be that they were not biddable. Does he really want the new House to sparkle? If he inserted this lot, no one could ever again accuse him of cronyism.
The author is parliamentary sketchwriter for the “Daily Telegraph”
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