William Waldegrave: “The hereditary House of Lords element must end”

The former Conservative cabinet minister – and life peer – on the ancien régime.

To use the feudal euphemism, William Waldegrave was born a spare, not an heir. The second son of the 12th Earl of Waldegrave, he told me that as a boy in the 1950s he would occasionally visit the House of Lords after school to meet his father and other giants of the peerage. But he always knew that his elder brother, James, would inherit the seat, necessitating a democratic route into politics. Waldegrave became a Conservative MP in 1979, and a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The family had circumvented the bounds of primogeniture: a parliamentary attendant once noted to Waldegrave that his father “was speaking in the Lords at the same time as I was speaking in the Commons”.

Not all hurdles could be so readily vaulted, however. Waldegrave failed to reach Downing Street residence he had dreamed of as a child, before losing his Commons seat at the 1997 election, two years after his father’s death. His brother then lost the family seat in the Lords in 1999, victim of the first Blairite cull of hereditary peers. But the British aristocracy’s powers of reproduction proved irresistible. Just months before the hereditaries were excised, Waldegrave was raised to a life peerage in his own right, becoming Baron Waldegrave of North Hill. He took up the same shield and crest that his father had inherited.

The elevation capped a quadrangle-to-quadrangle career that has made him an avatar for the British ancien régime: president of the Oxford Union, distinguished fellow of All Souls and, until last summer, provost of Eton. We met in the offices of another early-modern English institution, the private bank Coutts & Co, where Waldegrave is a consultant. The place is a pleasingly English pile-up of past and present: established in 1692, and yet these days coffee can be ordered to your meeting room via mounted iPad.

Now, several of Waldegrave’s formative institutions are under attack. Before it became consumed by rows over freebies and freed criminals, the Starmer government’s driving purpose seemed to be egalitarian reform. Only 8 per cent of Starmer’s cabinet is privately educated and, after the Etonian renaissance of the 2010s, there are now just four old boys in the House of Commons. Far from considering the class war “over” like his predecessor Tony Blair, the son of a toolmaker began his premiership by declaring war on posh. Unveiled in this government’s first King’s Speech, the government imposed VAT on private school fees (in force since 1 January), as well as legislation to modernise the House of Lords by removing its last hereditary members and introducing a compulsory retirement age of 80. The bill to reform the Lords is currently making its way through the Commons.

In his memoir, A Different Kind of Weather (2015), Waldegrave writes with nostalgia for his postwar upbringing in a merrier England: the country house, the tenant farmers’ lunch, the genial cook in her scullery. The place and its traditions were “a celebration”, he writes, “of family, of community, of hierarchy, of the social contract”. And yet, he told me, “while there’s always sadness when things change”, he doesn’t “feel any sentiment about this House of Lords as it is now”. Even in his own lifetime, he said, it was never anything as grand as “a gathering of the estates of the realm”: “It’s obvious that the hereditary element must end.”

What would succeed this medieval anachronism, however, is an open question. Waldegrave believes that, rather than create a second elected house that could challenge the Commons, the upper chamber could be an answer to Britain’s chronic overcentralisation: “[We should] use the tradition of the Upper House to do something new, which is to try to represent the regions.” The Lords would become a forum for mayors and local officials from across the country’s cities, regions and nations.

But the Lords’ role in everyday democracy has only become more important in recent decades. Waldegrave argued that as a result of Blair’s constitutional reforms, which expedited the passage of bills through the Commons, a great deal of parliamentary business “arrives in the House of Lords undebated”, leaving the government “trying to correct its own legislation” post hoc. The Lords has therefore become a vital revising workshop, a role that any remodelled chamber would have to take up.

W aldegrave is clearer on public schools: “I don’t want to live in a country where the state has a monopoly on education,” he said. If a government is going to tolerate private education, “the test is: do [schools] make things available to as many people as possible who can’t pay the fees”? These provisions are, Waldegrave argued, easier to control if private schools retain charitable status. He scoffed at the hypocrisy of the government targeting private schools in the UK while boasting of the establishment of a British-run independent girls’ school, Downe House Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia – as business secretary Jonathan Reynolds did last September.

Having been provost of Eton for 15 years – a period in which the school became seen as a proving ground for upper-class vandals like Boris Johnson – Waldegrave understands the hostility towards public schools. He told me that public schools do sometimes nurture an intensely competitive attitude that generates a “Caesar complex, or what is actually an Achilles complex, an Alexander the Great complex – that all that matters is to win”. Public schools “can produce people who are separated from the rest of society”. But Eton and schools like it provide a vital function, he said, by tolerating eccentricity and by preserving subjects, such as classics, which are often neglected by the crumbling state system and university sector.

Public hostility to hereditary privilege and paid-for education is part of a wider rancour towards political elites of any sort, who are variously seen as venal, bungling and detached. I asked Waldegrave if public schools and the Lords are failing to inculcate the elite with noblesse oblige: responsibility, duty and public service. “It’s easy to mock noblesse oblige,” he said, “but let’s have a modern doctrine that attaches the billionaire to public duty in the same way.” His model elite is one of service and obligation – the opposite, he said, of the oligarchic tendencies of Silicon Valley plutocrats, whose reckless libertarian influence on parts of the Conservative Party deeply concerns him.

In his simultaneous defence of public schools and support for Lords reform, William Waldegrave represents a patrician, gradualist strain of British conservatism that is increasingly crowded out in a Tory party obsessed with “disruptors” and creative destruction. His politics are protean, versatile. “I am a Berliner,” he said, smiling, when I mentioned one of his intellectual heroes, Isaiah Berlin. And from Berlin he has inherited a suspicion of doctrines and grand theories, and a fear of society’s capacity to tip into tyranny. This is a tradition of British intellectual conservatism currently absent from the political party of that name: a preference for the real over the utopian, and a belief in preserving organic communities formed from bonds of service and mutual respect.

“Liberalism is nearly right,” Waldegrave said. “Of course we want to talk about individual rights and the law and all that, but they’ve got to be based on something that isn’t drawn from themselves… Community precedes the institutions, and social cohesion is more subtle and more complicated than the institutions which then grow from it.”