These Lords will have to be elected

Who would want a peerage these days? The cash-for-honours affair has splattered the ermine of even the most guiltless Lords. It is hard to imagine many middle-aged men huddled hopefully around their trees this Christmas hoping for 'a K or a big P'. Santa's is the last fur-trimmed red robe to have escaped unbesmirched.

I don't enjoy pointing this out. I was one of those who saw no need for Lords reform in the first place. "If it is not necessary to change," said the third Viscount Falkland, "it is necessary not to change." Quite.

But when it is necessary to change, reform should be embraced properly. A parliamentary report published on Wednesday accurately recognised the damage caused by cash-for-honours. The trouble is that its recommendations - giving more power to the Electoral Commission and less to the PM - fail to address the essential

problem, which is that the current method of elevation rewards the kind of person who should at all costs be kept away from legislative power, vis the busybody who can’t get himself elected to anything.

Small-c conservatives who still trot out the 'if it ain't broke' line should take a closer look at the peers who have been appointed since Labour changed the rules in 2000. Some of them, of course, are qualified and patriotic. But the majority are placemen who have spent their lives in the public sector. They sit on committees. They draw up strategy papers. They liaise with stakeholders. They drive innovation. They spend a surprising amount of time on the Eurostar to Brussels.

And their first instinct, faced with almost any problem, is to spend money. The second chamber, as currently constituted, is the supreme embodiment of the quango state. It is time for direct elections.