June Sarpong, one of Britain’s newest peeresses-to-be. (Photograph by Duk3L1xon, CC-BY-SA-4.0)
After a political saga lasting about two months, we are almost at the official end of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership. It is expected that Andy Burnham will formally be declared (upon the closing of the nominations deadline with nobody else coming forward) Leader of the Labour Party tomorrow, and then kiss hands at Buckingham Palace on Monday. On what is effectively his last weekday in office, Starmer’s government has published yet another list of new life peers.
This has been styled in the government’s announcement as a list of “Political Peerages”, which has emerged over the past few years as the designation to be used when there is no particular occasion being commemorated with the timing of the announcement. Even so, the exact timing of this particular list has had some commentators wondering if this is not effectively Starmer’s resignation honours list by another name, as he had previously stated he would not issue one. Other sources have speculated that there will be a separate resignation list coming later in addition to this one.
The public have been caught out by this before: A list of political peerages released on 14th October 2022 was initially thought to commemorate the resignation of Boris Johnson, but it was later clarified that these had been drawn up long before the fall of his government, and his actual resignation list arrived the following June.
Properly counting the numbers of peers appointed by each Prime Minister is more difficult than simply counting them by date (as can of course be done through Wikipedia), as the first handful in each premiership are likely to be dissolution and/or resignation honours recommended by the previous leader, and those appointed during the term will include a significant minority recommended by the leaders of the prominent opposition parties as well as the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Perhaps a more meaningful tally would be restricted to those of the Prime Minister’s own party during his term as party leader.
Starmer became Leader of the Labour Party on 4th April 2020 and remained Leader of the Opposition until 5th July 2024. Looking through the lists, it seems the first Labour peer appointed during this time was the Baroness Clark of Kilwinning on 3rd September 2020, as part of the long-delayed Dissolution Honours for 2019. At time of writing Clark has already retired from the Lords. The last to be appointed before the general election was the Baroness Hazarika on 14th March 2024. All in all twenty-two Labour life peers were appointed during Starmer’s time as opposition leader.
The 2024 Dissolution Honours were, as I posted at the time, rather oddly released on polling day itself, though of course the formal created of those peerages did not begin until more than a month after Starmer’s government had taken power. That list contained eight Labour appointees. During that short interval period, Starmer fast-tracked another five peers as direct ministerial appointments. From then until the end of that session I counted another fifty-nine Labour nominations. I won’t count Stansgate and Grantchester because those were essentially retentions of existing members rather than new ones.
Today’s list has a further sixteen. That makes a total of 110 Labour life peers who owed their seat to Starmer’s nomination during the six years and three months he was leader. That works out as about once every twenty-one days. If split by time in and out of government, it comes to one for every fifty-two days as Leader of the Opposition and one for every nine days as Prime Minister. That latter figure will obviously rise further if there is indeed a separate resignation list. Gordon Brown, by contrast, nominated only eleven peers from his own party during his entire premiership, followed by twenty-nine in the subsequent dissolution list. That averages about one for every twenty-six days.
Even as someone who has followed the upper house intently for over a decade, I’m still a little confused about the significance of a peerage, or indeed any other honour, emanating from one type of list rather than another. Torrance’s briefing from two years ago, itself derived from an explainer by the Institute for Government two years prior identifies six different routes to a life peerage, but this still does not provide perfect clarity and there have been many peers appointed who could have fit into more than one of those categories. This also applies to other honours, and this confusion is exemplified when more than one honours list is published simultaneously.
On 29th December 2023, for example, the New Year Honours for 2024 were published alongside Liz Truss’s long-delayed resignation list and a list of “political honours” recommended by Rishi Sunak. Karen Bradley, David Davis, Liam Fox, Sajid Javid, Siobhain McDonagh, Jackie Doyle-Price, Jeremy Quin and Alec Shelbrooke were all appointed various forms of knight or dame. Does anyone now remember or care who came via which process? Once you’ve got your title, the reason for getting it no longer matters. Certainly from the perspective of what Bagehot calls the dignified part of the state it makes no difference what bureaucratic apparatus was used to recommend you for whatever token the Crown bestows upon you; a baron is a baron and a dame is a dame, your patent or warrant, your robes or regalia, your investiture or introduction, your entry in Debrett’s and the Gazette will all be the same irrespective of whether you are getting it in reward for good deeds or ill.
Even so, it would be interesting to discover if, among Parliamentarians themselves, there is a practical difference in social prestige between members with the same accolades depending on who got theirs at which time of year. I would also be interested in a study by Torrance or some other researcher which analysed long-term trends in peers’ Parliamentary activity, stratified according to the type of process by which they were appointed, to see if that makes a practical difference either. In the meantime, however, I look forward to seeing today’s twenty-six take their seats, if only to get a look at James Peill appearing as Garter for the first time.
UPDATE (18th July)
Yesterday the Hansard Society put out this podcast discussing this recent list, and also referencing this speech by the Lord Speaker.
