The House of Lords as we knew it has practically disappeared. Some believe it has been replaced by a House of Cronies comprising celebrity PR men and tame newspaper editors; still others, we read, are drawing up plans to call the incumbents LoPs (Lords of Parliament). No one, least of all the Prime Minister, seems to know what the future holds for the Upper Chamber, but one thing is certain. In getting rid of the hereditaries, the government has removed a good deal of colour from our national life.
The End of the Peer Show may be the most hackneyed of headlines, but in one respect it’s true. Call them sexist, racist and any other “ist” you care to mention, but there’s no denying the one great talent of the collective aristocracy. As a source of amusement, they are – well – peerless.
“I couldn’t become an MP because I’m quite shy and terrified of sound-bites,” admitted Lord Iveagh recently, adding that he attended the Lords “just to buck everyone up”. Lord Stockton, defending his son Dan’s right to a place in the House, demanded: “How many MPs have dated both Kate Moss and Jade Jagger?” Another peer was registering his 75 words in the clerk’s office when the division bell went off. “What’s that ghastly noise?” he inquired.
These are mere diverting mini-routines of ridiculousness. Yet it takes a lord’s combination of staggering snobbery and eye-watering excess to put on a performance such as John Hervey, the Marquess of Bristol, treated us to during his brief life. A caricature of aristocratic arrogance, he was fond of reading out begging letters from the parents of sick children over the dinner table and squandered a £7 million fortune entirely on drugs (guests at his parties were instructed by the butler: “Cocaine on the left, heroin on the right”). Those who survived the parties might then be attacked by his dogs or even their host – an American woman was once sent out on the boating lake in a rubber dinghy and shot at from the shore.
He was not the only lord to add a daub or two of colour to the national canvas by dint of his eccentricity. The Victorian peer Lord Elgin thought nothing of throwing a medieval tournament costing millions on the grounds of his Scottish estate; one of the Dukes of Devonshire moved an entire village because it interfered with the view from Chatsworth; while a certain Lady Ormsby-Gore fixed her dentures in with the same cement she used to fix the estate walls.
But there’s more to the aristocracy than vaudeville. Take English literature. Aristocrats – as writers or as characters – have been as essential to it as paper and ink. The romance, the dash, the very Byronness of Byron, owes much to the aristocratic excesses associated with being a lord – albeit an impecunious and club-footed one. Would he have seemed quite so mad, bad, let alone dangerous to know, if he’d been plain Mr Byron?
Jane Austen’s entire literary reputation lies on her deft handling of snobbery – the great British national theme, made possible by the existence, and codes of behaviour, of the noble families. Austen created a series of mothers obsessed with bagging a title for their daughters, and a clutch of snooty lords and obsequious curates oiling around waspish ladies. Nor was she alone. The Brontes had a keen and unforgiving eye for the niceties (or unpleasantnesses) of social exclusion and savagely caricatured the upper classes. And Oscar Wilde, too, exposed the hypocrisy and shallowness of the smartest social circles.
More recently, characters from Hyacinth Bucket to Margo Leadbeater and writers from Nancy Mitford to Alan Bennett have kept the aspirational aspidistra flying.
It is supremely ironic that the House of Lords is being destroyed at the very moment when public interest in the upper classes reaches its zenith. We seem to be more dazzled by debs than our most forelock-tugging forebears. Colt-legged society girls once confined to the front of Country Life and the back of Harpers are now splashed everywhere (not even the furthest flung of Hebridean outposts escapes the adventures of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson). Minority upper-class pursuits such as hunting get disproportionately enormous news coverage. Lara Croft, the virtual computer game heroine recently voted more important than Tony Blair, is an Hon with a lord for a father. And we’re more interested in Posh than any other Spice.
We’re the classless society, Blair’s Brave New Britain, yet more of us are shoving our children into private schools than ever before, and hitching our surnames together happens so often that it’s positively common to be double-barrelled. We’re obsessively interested in matters such as the pros and cons of fish-knives and whether one says sofa or settee (or, heaven forfend, couch). The complex world of upper-class manners is a set of tiny but significant traps to root out the interloper. For those in the know, it’s a diverting game with rules for everything from how to sit (up – slouching looks so ghastly) to pronunciation (say “rum” instead of room, and next time you’re chatting with the Queen, remember she is “Mam” as in spam” and never “Marm” as in smarm).
Ridiculous though all this may seem, we are a class-obsessed people whose national characteristic, our sense of humour, stems from the gap between the imposition of behavioural codes by the aristocratic minority and the majority’s attempts to crack them. No one laughs at snobbery more – but no one ultimately takes it more seriously. Abolish the Lords if you will, Mr Blair, but you’ll never stop people worrying about fish-knives.
The writer’s “Bad Heir Day” is published by Headline (£10)
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