Moving the House of Lords has nothing to do with serving the north – it’s a threat to peers

The subtext seems to scream ‘screw with us by blocking our legislation, you daft old fossils, and we’ll condemn you and your ermine-lined zimmers to countless 400-mile round trips to York’

Brave New World is universally regarded as one of the classics of dystopian fiction, but for the life of me, I’ve never understood why.

Admittedly, the government in Aldous Huxley’s novel is no beacon of benign democracy. But it never mooted transferring the House of Lords to York (or Birmingham, or one of Saturn’s rings; the details remain sketchy). Best of all, if not for the best of reasons, it made the oblivion drug soma freely available to citizens.

If someone offered you a dose that would put you into a coma for four and a bit years, or however long it takes to rid Downing Street of the Johnson-Cummings Axis powers, you would, in the parlance of the football pundit, rip their arm off.

In the tragic absence of that utopian option, we appear condemned to a uniquely poisonous governmental cocktail of quarter-witted, gimmicky and unnerving authoritarianism.

Which of those two headers is more applicable to the notion of transplanting the Lords is, at this embryonic stage in the meisterplan’s life, hard to call.

The reflex reaction on reading the news is to plump for the former. What practical point can there be, after all, to relocating several hundred semi-legislators some 200 miles to the north of Neo-Gothic Hellhole-on-Thames?

Since the proposal’s stated raison d’etre is to allow the House of Lords to “reconnect with the public”, the answer is evidently zero.

“When the prime minister stood up the day after the general election and said this is going to be a people’s government, he meant it,” explains Tory chairman James Cleverly, co-resident with his cabinet colleagues of the sheltered home in Boris Johnson’s upper colon. “And that meant connecting people with government and politics.”

Regardless of what the engagingly misnamed Cleverly affects to believe, that is a technical impossibility. There has never been any such connection. By its nature, a body of the unelected must be unconnected to those who never voted for them.

Every now and then, however, such a body can protect the public’s interests, by thwarting or delaying the will of an elective dictatorship such as ours. Which brings us to the alternate possibility – The Trump Paradox – that a virus of malevolent cunning lurks in the bloodstream of the cretinous.

This proposal, in other words, could be a low-level mafiosi threat. Screw with us by blocking our legislation, you daft old fossils, and we’ll condemn you and your ermine-lined zimmers to countless 400 mile round trips to the frozen north. Behave yourselves, and we’ll let you go on trousering the £300 daily expenses for no more inconvenience than a short hop along the Circle line.

Whether the root of the idea is silliness or nastiness, or a smattering of both, it may well prove a pioneer for others like it. If it performs OK with the focus groups, it could lay the ground for other and more alarming threats.

Currently in the forefront of the Axis powers’ crosshairs, along with such other traditional cornerstones of this withering democracy as the Supreme Court, is the BBC.

It’s a handy guide to the wafer thinness of Johnson’s alabaster epidermis that this is so. The state broadcaster couldn’t have bent over a millimetre further to accommodate him during the election campaign without snapping its spine.

Yet a little light teasing about his own cowardice from Andrew Neil seems to have elicited the vindictive spite which is one of his more charming traits.

Given its dread of losing the licence fee, it is highly unlikely that the BBC will regrow a pair and start holding him adequately to account. But if by some miracle it does, how long before Johnson floats the banishment of the Corporation from the capital (not to mention its second home in Salford, especially if local MP Rebecca Long-Bailey becomes Labour leader), and replanting the whole kit and caboodle in Tajikistan?

On balance, as I said, the House of Lords’ suggestion resembles mindless idiocy more closely than studied malice.

What we seem to be embarking on, ladies and gents, is government by reality show. For the inaugural series with the working title HoL … LOL!!!, the ancient Viking stronghold of York makes a remarkably well-chosen first port of call.

The inconvenience of being lumbered with scores of befuddled duffers would be water off an aquatic bird’s back to a city labouring under the humiliation of sharing its name with a certain royal duke.

If the York experiment took off, the caravan could move on to other locales, spreading mirth and merriment across the land in the fashion of the sadly defunct Radio 1 Roadshow.

Portsmouth, Dundee, Newport, South Shields, Plymouth, Upton Snodsbury, Tolpuddle, St Mary Mead … the good folk of which town, city and hamlet across this sceptic isle wouldn’t rejoice to nip out for a second-class stamp, and find an 83-year-old at the front of the queue asking the postmistress if this is the right place to collect the 300 quid?

Seductive as the prospect is, an impish voice in the head whispers that it will never happen; that the Axis is as sincerely committed to this project as to tackling homelessness and the surging need for food banks.

I will, of course, be delighted to apologise for the cynicism the very moment a crane sporting a heraldic crest is spotted in central York. In the meantime, anyone for soma?