The House of Lords is often described as ‘the best private members’ club in London’. Certainly, it has an appearance more impressive than White’s, a menu more subsidised than Boodle’s and a membership more aristocratic – in the modern sense – than Pratt’s.

The most recent vandalism of ejecting the actual hereditary peers has been the final act in making the House of Lords the bastion of our new aristocracy: the same people who run our Oxbridge colleges and sit on councils of this or that and who occupy the same comfortable thought-world as many of our bishops and academics and judges.

The assisted suicide bill has shown the House of Lords at its best and at its worst

The assisted suicide bill has shown the House of Lords at its best and at its worst

Since the Blair revolution, this class has been able to entrench within the highest echelons of the British state themselves, their supporters, their friends and very often their families too. They are in every sense the new aristocracy – though Greek scholars might fairly contend that aristoi (‘the best’) has now so strayed from its original sense as to be meaningless. The place that they most coveted was that members’ club: the Lords. This was supposed to be their Valhalla; the majestic and gilded hall wherein they receive their just rewards. The House of Lords is therefore, in a sense, more powerful than it has been since Victorian times, in that it is once again filled with people who actually run the........

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