Today’s Telegraph runs a story that a group of Blairite Labour MPs is urging Lord Mandelson to take advantage of provisions in a Bill currently before Parliament and resign from the Lords, with a view to replacing Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour party after the next general election. According to the Telegraph:
supporters of David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, could change their allegiance to Lord Mandelson as the most credible “keeper of the Blairite flame”.
Lord Mandelson, for his own part, is said to be “intrigued” by the idea.
The story has, in fact, been doing the rounds for a while now, and the extent to which it is founded on fact or is merely summer speculation must be a matter of debate. The Telegraph reports the details of the proposal as follows:
The plan depends on a change in the law to allow peers to resign from the House of Lords, which has already been announced by Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to be speeded up.
Lord Mandelson would then become Mr Mandelson once again – and declare himself available to stand as a Labour candidate in the general election, which must be held by next June.
His supporters hope Hilary Armstrong, the 63-year-old former chief whip, could be persuaded to back Lord Mandelson, her friend and political ally, as her successor in North West Durham, which has a Labour majority of 13,443.
The change in the law referred to is clause 9 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, whose first reading took place shortly before the summer recess. This provides that “any person who is an excepted hereditary peer or a life peer may at any time resign from the House of Lords”.
Resignation from the House of Lords, however, would not appear to amount to the disclaimer of the peerage itself – unlike the position under the Peerage Act 1963, where the peerage is disclaimed for life.
The consequence would therefore seem to be that, if the proposal went exactly according to plan, there would be no need for Lord Mandelson to “become Mr Mandelson once again”.
The House of Lords Act 1999 removed the disqualification of peers from membership of the House of Commons. At present, there are three hereditaries sitting in the Commons: Viscount Thurso, who was, in 2001, the first hereditary peer to elected be elected to Parliament after the Act, and who sits as John Thurso; Douglas Hogg, who became the third Viscount Hailsham on the death of his father in 2004; and Michael Ancram, who became the thirteenth Marquess of Lothian, also in 2004.
Post 1999, there appears to be no reason, other than convention, why an hereditary peer elected to the Commons should not continue to use his title. There would appear to be even less reason for a life peer who resigned his membership of the Lords under the new provisions to cease to do so.
Therefore, after the next general election, if the Blairites’ scheme goes exactly according to plan, the electors of Durham North West could find themselves represented in Parliament by the Rt Hon Baron Mandelson, of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in (appropriately enough) the County of Durham.
In every sense, the First Secretary of State and Lord President of the Council would become simply the First Lord.
