The granting of titles to life peers has a gender imbalance. When a man becomes a peer, his wife automatically becomes a Lady. But when …

Just as the MP expenses saga re-ignites, former Speaker Michael Martin who was ousted from his role in the Commons due to his complete mismanagement …

Lord Jay, Chairman of the Lords Appointment Committee, is very much right to have written to all three party leaders and asked them to make …

The former Speaker of the House of Commons was quietly confirmed as a life peer – taking the title Baron Martin of Springburn, of Port …

Jack Straw’s new proposals for continuing to reform of the House of Lords (just a decade after starting it!) bear an extremely marked similarity to …

So we have the first Speaker to be forced out of his job in 300 years – a convention-breaking act – and now, with the …

Rats always try and escape from a sinking ship, we all know that. Which is why this story isn’t really all that surprising:

Gordon Brown is …

Alan Watkins the “Commentators Bruce Forsyth” in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday

Peerages have recently and, indeed, always have been, granted for services rendered to the party in office or to its leader and his or her hangers-on.

The service can take a variety of forms: money; readiness to make way for someone else in the House of Commons; joining the Government, as with Lord Mandelson and several ministers in Mr Brown’s first administration of 2007; long service and obedient conduct; even, in rare cases, merit. With the exception of the last category, the whole process is essentially corrupt. “Grasp that, dear boy,” as the late Malcolm Muggeridge used to say to me in many connections, “and you grasp all.”

Quite.

Is that an argument for wholesale reform of the Lords?

No it isn’t, since it is obvious that the Lords have been far more effective in holding the Governent to account over the last 3 decades at least than the Official Opposition.

It is, instead, an argument for Lords with ethics who know what is acceptable – so I think that Jack Straw’s reforms are moving in the right direction.

The House of Lords has been getting a bit of a battering in the press recently, after the “cash for laws” scandal erupted, over four …