Geoffrey Howe began his period of high ministerial office as one of the architects of the Thatcher revolution. He was her first Chancellor of the Exchequer. Later, he went to seed, EUphoria and the Foreign Office, crowning his moral and intellectual decline with the speech that precipitated the Iron Lady’s fall from power. For years now, he has sat in Britain’s House of Lords, the upper house ‘reformed’ by Tony Blair and which is now filled with establishment cronies and a few hereditary relics. After years of an increasingly overweening executive, it’s more than ever clear that Britain, like most democracies, needs an effective – elected – upper house.

The existing crowd, establishment placemen and career sycophants, needless to say, don’t agree.

And M’Lord Howe, supine, useless, complacent, but, sadly, still sort of relevant, writes in the London Spectator that that’s just fine:

“Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Lords rejected the idea [of injecting a bit of democracy into their club] by a majority of four to one. They might, of course, have done so solely out of self-interest. But it could make more sense to acknowledge that they may, after all, be best placed to judge the likely impact of an elected element upon the almost universally well-regarded way in which they currently work.”

Chuck ‘em all out – starting with Howe – and bring in that vulgar, vulgar ‘elected element.’