And through the round window, it’s Lady Floella Benjamin. The actress and TV presenter, best known for her 14-year stint on the children’s programme Playschool, has been honoured in the Dissolution Honours List for her work campaigning on education issues.
Benjamin is the founder of Touching Success, a charity that aims to link children with role models, and was a member of the Liberal Democrats’ commission on primary education. She will sit in the House of Lords as a Lib Dem peer.
A few names had leaked out this morning, but the full list is now up on the Downing Street website. There are to be 55 new peers in all.
The list includes some predictable entries — for instance, John Prescott and Michael Howard. (Incidentally, it is worth asking how his elevation to the Lords might affect Prescott’s availability to make an effective party treasurer.)
Other former frontbenchers moving to the Lords include the former defence secretaries John Reid, Des Browne and John Hutton, the former chief secretary to the Treasury Paul Boateng and the former Northern Ireland first minister Ian Paisley.
Quentin Davies, another former minister of defence who crossed the floor from the Tories, will become a Labour peer. The former Metropolitan Police commisioner Sir Ian Blair, who was ousted shortly after Boris Johnson became Mayor of London, becomes a crossbench peer.
There are a few slightly more controversial political appointments, such as Michael Spicer, who until stepping down at the election chaired the 1922 Committee, and Sue Nye, the gatekeeper Gordon Brown blamed for his “Bigotgate” run-in with Gillian Duffy during the campaign in Rochdale. Anna Healy, a former adviser to Harriet Harman and wife of Jon Cruddas, also becomes a Labour peer.
The unions have their customary representation, with Margaret Wheeler of Unison and John Monks of the European TUC making an appearance. Single-issue campaigners, too, are present, with Helen Newlove, a campaigner against drink-related violence, and Deborah Stedman-Scott, chief executive of the employment charity Tomorrow’s People, both becoming Tory peers.
But the prizes for the wackiest appointments most defintely go to Benjamin and Shireen Ritchie, grass-roots Tory campaigner and stepmother of Guy Ritchie, who was once interviewed in the Daily Mail about her love life as part of an article on “passionate pensioners”.
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