At the time of writing, I haven’t seen the King’s Speech, but it’s a safe bet it will include a bill to enable wayward peers to be stripped of their titles.

The point, of course, is so that Keir Starmer, if he’s still PM by then, can show us just how much he loathes Peter Mandelson. It’s the equivalent of Loyalists after the Restoration exhuming Cromwell’s corpse so they could ‘execute’ him and stick his head on a spike in Westminster Hall. But because Mandelson hasn’t been found guilty of a crime – and is unlikely to be – the bar for removing a title will have to be quite low. It will inevitably be some version of ‘bringing the Lords into disrepute’.

Tim Shipman and Noa Hoffman

‘It’s like a Mexican standoff but no one has any guns’: inside the farcical coup against Keir Starmer

Is Keir Starmer too boring to be prime minister?

The unstoppable rise of stupidity

You may think that’s not possible and I’m steeling myself for a barrage of ‘witticisms’ along those lines. But there’s a serious issue here. I know from my work at the Free Speech Union (FSU) that the nebulous standard of ‘bringing into disrepute’ is often invoked by green-haired Torquemadas to urge institutions to defenestrate anyone who........

© The Spectator