Some thoughts, your Lordship, on the reform of your House

Dear Lord Wakeham,

Congratulations on your appointment to yet another senior position in public service. First the Press Complaints Commission, and then this new Royal Commission on the reformed second chamber. Wow! It's only a shame that we haven't got any large colonies left, so that you can round your career off properly with a nice feathery hat and a medal.

To be honest, Your Lordship, my first thought was that appointing someone with your record to oversee radical reform was like putting a pacifist in charge of the Nato intervention force in Kosovo. You've been pretty conservative in the PCC job, haven't you?

But I ought to keep an open mind, not least because I want to serve on the Royal Commission too. No, really, I do. This may seem a bizarre way of bringing my desire to serve my changing country to the PM's attention, but I really cannot see myself going through the endless rounds of networking, lunching, cold-calling and flattery that usually accompany any attempt to break through into the super-quango stratosphere. Some are good at it, some aren't.

There are those who regret the passing of the hereditary peers, just as there is still a League of Empire Loyalists and, I dare say, a shadowy group dedicated to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy (whose scion is probably a Winnipeg acupuncturist). Personally I would be quite prepared to swap all those earls, dukes and whatevers for a convocation of hamsters and hedgehogs, if that were the only choice. It seems very sensible and not at all "control-freaky" to have this interim panel to nominate peers for the period between the guillotining of the aristos and the establishment of a new second chamber, otherwise known as Stage One. My only worry is that if the new Appointments Commission really does respond to public nomination (as is already happening in the drawing up of the honours list), we will end up with 200 hospice volunteers, youth workers and disabled athletes.

But, as you know, m'lud, whatever the obsession with who, the really big question is what. What is a second chamber for? And here's where the big worries begin. Your appointment is said to have reflected the desire for cross-party consensus on the question of reform. But insofar as this is to be a consensus between political parties and MPs of different persuasions, then it will also be a consensus that the second chamber should have no powers effectively to challenge the prerogatives of the House of Commons. Lady Jay intimated this much yesterday, when she reassured the world that "whatever the remit of the Royal Commission" MPs would remain supreme.

Lord Wakeham, you've been there. You know that what most members of the Commons would prefer would be a sedate gathering of worthy ex-civil servants, obligingly keeping tabs on all the most boring legislation emanating from Europe, and acting as a sounding-board for whinges from the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament. With the exception of an enlightened few, MPs would not want to endow another chamber with substantial rights of veto or delay.

Tony, of course, has his own agenda, Your Excellency. The remit of the Appointments Commission is to consider lay, non-party nominations to the second chamber on the basis of "the special qualities they could bring to the law-making process". And, perhaps, to government. He would like, I suspect, to widen the gene pool from which he and his successors can draw their ministers. Already the whispers are that Lords Falconer and Macdonald (the latter having been ennobled and given ministerial rank on the same day) are among the most effective of New Labour's administrators. Tony may well want to be able, in future, to draw yet more heavily on those who are not career politicians. Given that we do not operate a system of presidential appointments, the PM needs the fig-leaf of a second chamber to achieve this. And he cannot rely on his own party to provide them.

The real problem with the way we are governed lies in the Commons itself, and its relationship to the political parties. The present tribal selection of candidates, under the first-past-the-post system, tends to reward the obsessive and the devious, at the expense of the intelligent and the dynamic. To get elected you must belong to one of the big parties. For them to select you, you must conform to the local orthodoxy of what a good candidate should be like. Although more talented ones slipped under the wire in 1997, it is still the case that only about a tenth of MPs are either bright or curious enough to be decent companions at a Notting Hill dinner party.

When elected, the prime responsibility of those in the majority party is to support their government (of which they all hope to be members), and that of the minority party is to oppose it. It is little wonder that scrutiny (as in the select committee system) invariably stops short of serious embarrassment, or that three-line whips are rarely broken. As a result the Prime Minister, at the head of his whipped majority, exercises almost total, unchallenged powers over appointment, legislation and oversight. Whether or not a PM is a "control freak" is utterly irrelevant. He or she is more completely in control than any American president could ever dream of being.

You witnessed all this, Your Highness, when you served under Mrs Thatcher. Were you not around for the poll tax? And you must know that one voice in this debate is in danger of going unheard. It is the voice that argues for a substantial second chamber, composed of people who do have the power substantially to delay, alter or block government legislation and appointments. I should like to see a senate whose committees are feared and respected by citizens and public servants in a way that, currently, Commons Select Committees are not. (I exempt those chaired by Gerald Kaufman, who I gather is to help you out. That'll be fun.) And if the second chamber is not to have such powers, then I am reluctant to spend taxpayers' money on it all.

I am not against ideas to link the senate to the devolved bodies in Wales and Scotland (though I suspect that MSPs and MWAs will have better things to do with their time). And I am very much in favour of a number of non- party nominees who have not had to go through the party selection grinder. The Independent Appointments Commission is welcome, though I shall be interested to see who is appointed to make the appointments. But what a modern Britain needs is a mostly elected, legitimate and powerful second chamber, which can assist good government and protect citizens' rights through the exercise of real, not chimerical, power.

That's it. I look forward to hearing from you. By the way, Mondays and Wednesdays are difficult for me.

With best wishes,

David