A democratic embarrassment

RARELY in your columnist’s forays around Britain has anywhere fulfilled his worst expectations as the House of Lords did this week. The upper house of the British Parliament is in many ways a joke.

The lethargy and decrepitude evident among the noble legislators your columnist observed, creeping along the Palace of Westminster’s lushly carpeted corridors like so many pinstriped snails, or sipping their way in its Thames-side bars towards a mid-afternoon stupor, was depressing. “Oh God, look at him!” cried an eminent peer, pointing at one of these aged gastropods. “This is not a lovely retirement home! Actually, it is a lovely retirement home.” Could anyone consider such a place, stuffed with unelected party hacks and semi-functioning geriatrics, an appropriate assembly for modern Britain? It was even more depressing to hear that some peers do, albeit that this experience was often leavened by absurdity: as when an ancient and extremely pompous Conservative peer accompanied his ponderous self-justification with a noisy and protracted fart.