Simon Carr: The wonderful world of the Lords

It's the magic kingdom of British politics: an anachronistic haven for the eccentric, the unbiddable and the plain mad. Today, the Government unveils its most specific proposals yet for a rational alternative. Our parliamentary sketch-writer is deeply depressed

Many years ago, I lodged for three months in the pantry of a large house near Hyde Park. The more senior tenants of the house had discovered, in a drawer, a stash of postcards from the absentee landlord, who was one of England's grander earls. He was a vigorous correspondent – though it wasn't clear whether Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh ever wrote back – and he kept copies of his letters on these cards. (I probably shouldn't be telling you this; don't pass it on.)

"Dear Lord Mountbatten," read one, "I have told the Bishop of Westminster to tell the Royal Family that I am King. Unless I write to you as if you were God, I'm afraid you may be liable to take offence."

Then to the Queen: "I hereby annul the Coronation."

And then to her prince: "Dear Philip, When you were about to marry Princess Elizabeth, you seemed to think you'd won some sort of prize. But what sort of prize is a dishonoured woman? Yours, etc. PS I dishonour her because she practically said she'd marry me and the dirty little tart married you."

And then, to no one in particular: "De minimis non curat lex. But it is not a small matter that the Queen should be an artificial inseminate."

His condition deepened. He adopted the sobriquet Father of his People. Then, the only name greater than his own: he started signing off as Christ, adding his own surname. He may have been the source material for The Ruling Class, filmed with Peter O'Toole as the mad, Messianic earl.

Until recently, he was entitled to a seat in the House of Lords, thus giving the benefit of representation to all other religious maniacs with a crucifixion complex. How else would such people be represented?

Oddly enough, one Lib Dem Lord analysed party affiliations of the attendant Lords in the Eighties and found that they almost perfectly matched the proportion of the popular vote cast in the previous election. That was interesting, wasn't it, such an arbitrary system producing a fairer (or, at least, more proportional) result than the democratic Commons?

True it may be, but also useless. The hereditary principle couldn't last. It was a lost cause. It was too contra mundum. Even miners had lost the right to inherit a job down their fathers' pit. And so it was with the Lords. In 1997, a Labour government was elected with a manifesto commitment to make the House of Lords more democratic. A Royal Commission was set up and, under Lord Wakeham, spent many months examining arguments and evidence. In April 1999, all but 92 of the House's hereditary peers were stripped of their sitting and voting rights. In January 2000, Lord Wakeham presented the Government with a smorgasbord of options for reform, which the Labour manifesto for this year's general election promised to put before a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament. That committee has yet to materialise. Instead, the Government will publish a White Paper today outlining its intentions, with a view to legislating next year.

Will the proposed reforms advance the cause of democracy? That depends what you think the House of Lords is for. It is not a question that Conservative intellectuals like. "What's the House of Lords for?" Enoch Powell once asked, rhetorically. "It's not for anything. It just is. Like oak trees. You don't ask what an oak tree is for, do you?" Which is not as silly as it sounds; the point was originally made by the Nobel-prizewinning economist Friedrich August von Hayek. It relates to the limits of knowledge, and how difficult it is to discern what old traditional institutions do. None the less, a quick, and possibly vulgar response is that oak trees are for acorns, and the House of Lords is for legislation. That's certainly one of the things it is for.

The Lords take the raw, lumpen, rather offensive legislative material produced in such quantities by the Commons, and they refine it into something useful. The septic tank does the same thing, and in the same way. For those who are paid to scoff, to pour scorn, to jeer, the House of Lords isn't always the best place to visit. It is widely accepted – certainly by the House of Lords – that they produce a higher standard of debate, more useful work, and lower output of party politics than the Other Place. They say that they provide pause for reflection; to test the legislation, to redraft the ridiculous, and to talk down, and possibly out, the manifestly unjust.

It may be so. But the only time I saw them with a chance to put their foot down (last year, over Jack Straw's restrictive and secretive Freedom of Information Bill) the Lib Dem peers voted against their interests, their philosophy and their constituents without any obvious quid pro quo.

But here's Lady Hollis, the Labour peer, batting for the other side in Austin Mitchell's book Farewell My Lords: "When I was in opposition, one year we had four Social Security Bills, including the Disability Bill, and I could win amendments here that we hadn't a hope of winning in the Commons... It could only be done in this sort of forum. And it could only be done because we don't have a Speaker, because we don't have cross benchers, and because the whip runs fairly lightly.

"If you decide to take the House seriously, and you're a fool not to, you could actually do a lot of good things here that you can't possible do down the other end."

It is certainly a very peculiar place, with its own impenetrable culture. Elaborate courtesies. Vast wigs. Bishops. Law Lords. Crucifixion addicts. Some very, very old people, cantilevering themselves into the chamber on a system of sticks. There's a Woolsack for the senior man. No one is called to speak, people get up when someone else sits down, as the spirit moves them. If more than one stands at the same time, the fastest, loudest and most determined prevails.

It's most unlike the Commons. More unpredictable, less political, and perhaps, therefore, more human. "If your front bench isn't up to it, they bloody well come and tell you. And it's intimated that it would be a good idea if you dropped them," Lord Cranborne, sometime Leader of the House, is the source of this extraordinary information. It certainly wouldn't happen in the Commons, nor in a fully reformed House of Lords.

Old observers are elegiac about the Upper House. The spirit has gone already, they feel. First the life peers arrived, then the hereditaries were drummed out. The glory is departed. The place is full of phonies and cronies, of placemen, second-raters and superannuated hacks who stepped down from their constituency to allow some favoured son of Downing Street to be parachuted into the Commons. That's one reason why the Prime Minister would never open the place up to full democracy – why would he give up such useful powers of patronage? And would an elected chamber be any better?

Lady O'Cathain canvassed 60-odd of her colleagues, asking them if they'd stand for election, if they had to be voted in. None of them said they would. "I couldn't do it," she said, "and most of the people here couldn't do it. If you had an elective chamber, you wouldn't keep what you've got here. You would get people who were self- seeking and would come for the note paper and the title. Simple as that."

Not that appointment by party bosses is any better. Look at Baroness Northover, or Southover, or Rollover, or whatever she's called herself. The young head of the Lib Dems' Women's section, low on her party list but now a legislating peer, and will be so for the rest of her professional life. Extraordinarily arbitrary, when you think about it, and not much less offensive than the hereditary principle. "Attend 10 Lib Dem conferences and win a peerage!" (Simon Hoggart's joke.)

New Labour began by demanding more democratic accountability; but you don't have to be a black-hearted cynic to suggest that was merely a rhetorical flourish to attract democrats. New Labour's instincts are to allow people to decide what they want for themselves, only insofar as they want the same things that New Labour wants.

So, where are we now? It is understood that Tony Blair has chosen the least democratic option from the Wakeham report, the one with the smallest number of elected peers (maybe fewer than 100). A committee of the great and good will elect another 100 of the great and good. And the party machines will appoint the rest.

It's a marvellous example of politics in action. The reforms will be thoroughly fudged and the new structure will be thoroughly sub-optimal because that's what the political incentives dictate. This is so shocking that younger readers may wish to look away. The Government will keep its powers of patronage, and subjugate the democratic element to an appointment system because it actively does not want a fully legitimate House of Lords.

A democratically elected second chamber would enjoy an authority that any Commons-based government would find a natural and necessary competitor in the legislative process. A House of Lords that spoke with the voice of the people might want to start acting like a senate, might want to interfere with money bills.

Politics is not about creating wealth, justice or the pursuit of happiness (though very occasionally these may be happy by-products of the process). It is about power. And politicians do not surrender power voluntarily. It is against the lore.

"I shall be speaking in favour of big bang [a radical democratisation of the current system] because it is certain that if we make it 100 per cent appointed, it would stay like that for decades, possibly centuries. That is not something I want to bequeath to Britain." That's Labour's Lord Kennet. Centuries, incidentally, may be an understatement.