Hereditary peers make last-ditch plea to be spared in ‘ruthless purge' of Lords
They argued sparing existing bloodline members would be 'a statesman-like choice' and foster future goodwill.
The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, which has already been through the Commons, will abolish the 92 seats reserved for members of the upper chamber who are there by right of birth.
There are currently 86 hereditary peers after the suspension of by-elections pending the legislation, the majority of whom – 44 – are Conservative.
The Bill delivers on a promise in Labour's election manifesto and has been promoted as the first step in a process of reform.
During its passage through the Lords, peers backed a change proposed by the Tories to block the expulsion of hereditary members already sitting at Westminster.
Instead, the abolition of the by-election system would see their number decline over time as individuals die or retire.
However, the Conservative amendment faces defeat when the Bill returns to the Commons, where the Government has a majority, during so-called 'ping-pong', when legislation is batted between the two Houses until agreement is reached.
Speaking at third reading, Tory shadow leader in the upper chamber Lord True warned: 'Without the fullest trust, respect and goodwill between the Government of the day and His Majesty's Opposition… this House cannot function.
'And the brutal reality is that the full exclusion of over 80 peers does not evidence full respect and cannot be the basis of full goodwill.'
He added: 'The Labour Party has won.
'No hereditary peer will ever again take their oath at this despatch box, but I submit it is not necessary on top of that, to wield the brutal axe on our colleagues who sit here now.
'That is what the amendment passed by the House for grandfather rights asked the Government to moderate.
'There is a chance and there is a choice, to temper historic victory with magnanimity in that victory.
'Such a statesman-like choice would benefit this House in keeping members we value, and at the same time, unleash a spirit of goodwill that I believe could carry us all together through the rest of this Parliament.'
Conservative hereditary peer Lord Strathclyde, who previously served as leader of the House, said: 'We all accept the mandate that the Government has to end the involvement of the hereditary principle as a route of entry to our House. But I join my colleagues of all benches still wondering why those of us already serving here are due to be flung out.
'What have these sitting parliamentarians done to deserve being shown the door in such a way?'
He added: 'It's never too late to appear gracious and magnanimous… Labour's victory in abolishing heredity here is real. Need we have such a ruthless and unnecessary purge as well?'
Tory hereditary peer Lord Mancroft argued he and his colleagues were being 'thrown out of this House like discarded rubbish'.
He said: 'We are now to be treated in a way that no one else in employment or in any workplace in Britain can be treated.
'It is rightly illegal to sack anyone on the basis of their birth except here in the upper House of this mother of parliaments.'
Lord Mancroft added: 'It is very personal to each and every one of us to be treated like this by those we considered our friends and colleagues. It is also deeply, deeply offensive, and I would simply like to know why? Is that really too much to ask?'
Responding, the Leader of the Lords Baroness Smith of Basildon again highlighted the removal of hereditary peers had been in the Labour Party manifesto.
She said: 'Of course this feels personal to those departing hereditary peers. It felt very personal to me when I lost my seat as a Member of Parliament, with far less notice.'
Lady Smith added: 'Nothing about the legislation says that we do not value the work of hereditary peers, or that of any other member of the House.
'That has always been the case, but we were quite clear that the hereditary route is not the route into the House that the country or the Labour Party expects.'
Other changes made by the Lords to the Bill, which will be considered by MPs after the summer recess, included a Conservative move to create life peers who do not have to sit at Westminster.
Peers also supported a Tory amendment to abolish unpaid ministers in the upper chamber, amid long-held concerns about Government frontbenchers in the unelected House not being remunerated for their official duties.
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The surface of the Conservative Party changed. But whether this change was anything more than cosmetic was irrelevant. 'Superficiality was the point,' as one leading moderniser told me. The Tories did not want to change their fundamental beliefs – small state, low tax, free-trading Euroscepticism – but the party needed a better way to package (and so defang) its ideology. Until 2005, Blair's Britain had not been particularly kind to Kemi Adegoke. Having grown up in Nigeria, she arrived in Britain in 1996. She attended a further education college, eventually studying computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex. Adegoke found that she was classed, in her words, as 'black' in Britain and placed within a 'black culture I didn't recognise'. In Nigeria, her family were upper middle-class, ethnically Yoruba and, until the country began to slide towards military dictatorship in the mid-1980s, wealthy. 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In 2005 Osinbajo was the attorney general in the Lagos state government. Her friend Taiwo Togun told the Times last year that Adegoke met a Nigerian political figure in 2005 but they belittled her and said something about how 'she would never make it'. And so she returned to Britain, lost. Badenoch described her state of mind in 2005 to Jordan Peterson on his podcast in February. 'I had done everything I was supposed to do,' she told the Canadian. She had her A-levels, her degree, and a job at a technology company. 'I still wasn't happy. I didn't know what I was looking for.' She was suffering what she called 'a quarter-life crisis'. It was at this point that Kemi Adegoke – a lonely computer engineer in south London – joined the Conservative Party and found what she was looking for. Within a few months she was attending her first event, a Christmas party in London organised by the Tories' youth wing. She chatted to the future MP Conor Burns who found her 'strikingly interesting'. Adegoke was British but foreign. She was a product of empire who reminded older Tories, at a subliminal level, what Britain used to be. She had good manners. She didn't swear. She enunciated. She venerated traditions and her elders. The next day Burns emailed Francis Maude, the modernising party chairman, telling him to get in touch with Adegoke as well as get her on to the candidates list because 'she's the future of the party'. Maude soon met Adegoke and shuttled her into one of the policy commissions set up by Cameron. Her 'quarter-life crisis' was over. Every need the 25-year-old Adegoke had would be fulfilled by the party. It was the only British institution that seemed to recognise her; it acted almost like a second family while her own were in Nigeria (Fawehinmi said that she had tried several times to bring her parents to Britain without success). Through the party she also met Hamish Badenoch, whom she would go on to marry and have three children with. The party gave her status: as a parliamentary candidate in Dulwich in 2010; as a member of the London Assembly in 2015; and, in a profoundly vindicating moment for the girl who had come from Lagos 20 years earlier, as the newly elected member of parliament for Saffron Walden in 2017. Within two years she was a minister. The Conservatives lived up to Badenoch's Blytonland idea of Britain when the rest of the country did not. It was still old-fashioned and hierarchical. These were her tribe: like her father they wanted things to be 'done properly'. The Conservative Party allowed her to transform from outsider to insider and to wield the power her father never achieved in his own career in Nigeria. Politics let her be a somebody in a country where many immigrants are ignored, looked down upon or even despised. The Conservative Party was the means of her ascent. The modernisers who met Adegoke saw in her the spirit of the times, the essence of 2005. As one of them told me: 'She was new Britain.' On 19 July 2017 the newly elected MP entered the House of Commons to make her maiden speech, which has formed the basis for her Toryism ever since. Less a speech than a personal story, Badenoch described doing her homework by candlelight in Nigeria 'and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a borehole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps'. She praised Britain for its 'opportunity' and its 'freedoms'. Looking to Britain as an 'African girl' she saw it as 'a beacon, a shining light, a promise of a better life'. Brexit was 'the greatest ever vote of confidence' – a phrase that also appeared in the Spectator's leading article on 2 July 2016 – in what she called 'the project of the United Kingdom'. Brexit, a vote instigated by opposition to large-scale immigration, was reinterpreted by Badenoch as a 'vision of global Britain'. Here was 'Badenochism', less an ideology than an idea of Britain wrapped up in her own migrant story. Badenoch's Britain is a 'project' in which anyone can thrive – as long as they are as self-reliant, strong, brave, decisive and formidable as Badenoch. Even as she plays classic Tory notes – paraphrasing Burke and praising Thatcher – her self-presentation is pleasingly subversive to conservative ears. She is a black woman – 'I am often inexplicably confused with a member of the Labour Party' – and therefore not supposed to be right wing. She could say things other Tories feared to say out loud. A year before entering parliament, Badenoch had worked briefly for the Spectator. Ex-colleagues have noted the strange effect Badenoch had on older white men, including the magazine's then editor, Fraser Nelson. 'Fraser was admirable in his desire to help the disadvantaged, and her story was tailor-made for him,' one said. They allege that Badenoch's deeply personal maiden speech was in part written by Nelson, her old boss. Did he fancy himself as kingmaker? 'It was exciting to create the next leader of the Conservative Party,' one old long-term former colleague of Nelson's said.(Nelson did not respond to a request for comment. Badenoch's team said this was 'untrue'.) After becoming minister for equalities in February 2020 Badenoch used the role to pick fights with woke campaigners detested by Tory grandees and grassroots alike, such as the trans lobby. She was demonstrating her ideological credentials while also showcasing her abilities as a street fighter, a useful skill inside the kill-or-be-killed prison yard that Tory politics was becoming. By the time that Boris Johnson's political career and government imploded in June 2022, Badenoch had done enough to allow her to make her most audacious move yet: to stand for the Tory leadership and, by extension, become prime minister. Some in her circle were nervous. They feared this bid from a relative newcomer might appear hubristic and backfire. But Badenoch was fortified by the enthusiastic backing of the latest older white man in her life: Michael Gove. Unsuccessful in his own bids for the leadership, Gove brought experience to the campaign as well as a contacts book stuffed with political and media heavyweights. Her outsider bid was launched at Policy Exchange on 12 July 2022 – a speech reportedly delayed because Badenoch ordered an aide to Deliveroo her a McDonald's breakfast before she addressed the assembled politicians and journalists. At a televised debate five days later, Badenoch declared herself 'the candidate for the future'. MPs, party members and journalists agreed that she was the liveliest of the contenders. Polling showed that if she made it into the final two, she would probably win the members' vote. By the time Badenoch was eliminated from the contest she had achieved her real objectives: leapfrogging her contemporaries into the Tory front rank, ensuring a cabinet job and giving herself an excellent prospect of becoming leader of the opposition in the event of a general election defeat. The scale of the Conservative Party's 2024 loss was, however, so great that it nearly cost Badenoch her seat. In 2019, she won re-election in Saffron Walden with a majority of 27,594 – 63 per cent of the vote. It was one of the safest seats in the country. In 2024, in the renamed but largely unchanged seat of North West Essex, her majority was cut to 2,610 – 35.6 per cent. Nationally the median age of a Conservative voter was 63. Badenoch's close call went largely unnoticed amid the carnage. Those who spoke to her in the aftermath found her in a state of shock. It seems likely that her confidence had been dented by the realisation that the party she aspired to lead stood on the edge of the abyss and that her own personal redoubt, which she had counted on as a safe base, was as precarious as any remaining piece of Tory territory. At the first meeting of the shadow cabinet in the aftermath of the election defeat, Badenoch launched a broadside about Rishi Sunak that was later leaked to the Times. She called Craig Williams, Sunak's parliamentary private secretary, a 'buffoon', and pointed to Sunak's disastrous gaffe over 'D-Day' as the source of the Tories' downfall. The next day Badenoch posted on X: 'It's a shame our discussions in the shadow cabinet were leaked yesterday.' It was the first act of her leadership campaign. Badenoch's comments to the shadow cabinet that day may not have been off-the-cuff remarks. A private notebook from the £1,240-per-night Dorchester Hotel seen by the New Statesman – filled with handwriting that seems to match Badenoch's own – contains a scribbled mind map that outlines the points she made at that shadow cabinet meeting, from the word 'buffoon' to a note: 'Unforced Errors — D-Day'. The words mirrored her criticism of Sunak's gaffe, which was later leaked to the Times. The notebook also contains affirmations about public speaking linked to the heading 'Personal Improvement': 'Breathe, breathe, breathe'; 'Pause, Pause, Pause'; 'You are a serious person who does big things'; 'Pivot to attacking Labour when uncomfortable'; 'Remember you are the standard bearer of the right'; 'Don't let people think you are easily wound up'. Badenoch's team says that 'Kemi does not believe she has lost her notebook'. Despite such leaks – and the scale of the defeat the Conservatives had suffered – the reality is that the Tories were almost immediately forgotten as Keir Starmer's new government got off to the worst possible start, enjoying no honeymoon amid the Southport riots, Waheed Alli freebie scandals, winter fuel payment outrage, and Sue Gray soap opera. This unexpected turn of events may explain why the Conservatives held a buoyant leadership contest in which the deeper problems facing the party were largely ignored. Having made it through to the final round with the support of less than a third of the party's remaining MPs, she appealed to the membership with her classic pitch: 'I am Labour's worst nightmare – they can't paint me as prejudiced.' Two months later, she discovered it was not Labour's opinion of her that mattered, but the views of those to her right. She would not be the 'standard bearer of the right' for long. Essex girl: Badenoch campaigning in her Saffron Walden constituency. Photo by Brian Harris /Alamy Live News Kemi Badenoch was an answer to a question posed by the modernisers in 2005: how can we make the Conservative Party a successful force in modern Britain? Badenoch rode the wave created by attempts to solve this question. But both the question and the answer have turned out to be fantasies. Modern conservatives are no longer at ease with diversity. The modern Conservative Party is not even at ease with itself – or its leader. Where Badenoch was once the darling of the Tory right, to many on this wing of British politics she now seems passé, if not complicit with the worst instincts of modernisation. In today's harder-edged Britain, the subjects she obsesses about appear small – even quaint. The new issues dominating public life are deep, raw, dangerous: migration, ethnicity, identity, belonging and economic failure. On each, she struggles to offer a coherent vision. Badenoch remains fixated on 'cultural issues'. During an 'in conversation' event with Charles Moore at Policy Exchange on 23 June, billed as the moment she would at last unveil an economic programme, Badenoch kept drifting away from Moore's questions. Asked how she would 'dramatise' economics as Mrs Thatcher once did, Badenoch began to talk about 'where being a woman' had an impact on her views, the 'extraordinary' recent change to abortion laws, and the 'sterilised' transgender 'kids' to whom she had spoken in her office. Moore, a long-time supporter, didn't seem to notice that an economic programme was not forthcoming. The material issues that now formed the basis of political debate – housing, crime, migration, inflation – had passed Badenoch by. She has been constantly outflanked by Jenrick from the right on many of them. Some of Badenoch's most trenchant critics are part of what has become known as the online right, a wild and influential hinterland of Substacks, podcasts and YouTube channels in which terms like 'remigration' and 'revolution' are common parlance. It is in this ungoverned space that hostility to Badenoch takes on a distinctly racialised tinge. Her Nigerian heritage – once thought by Tory modernisers to be a strength – is now seen by young right-wing types as a weakness, especially as her party struggles to keep up with Reform on illegal immigration and asylum. Their criticisms are beginning to be echoed by older right-wingers. More dangerous still to Badenoch's prospects is a very specific charge. It is said that she is failing to press home political attacks on the small-boats crisis because she is worried it will invite scrutiny of the way her parents got her citizenship. The accusation that Badenoch is an 'anchor baby', that her parents took advantage of British citizenship laws in the early 1980s to get their daughter a passport, has circulated for some time on the fringes of Tory and media circles, and been denied in the past by Badenoch. 'It's the elephant in the room,' said one source regarding the way Badenoch got her British citizenship. They compared Badenoch's parents, in crude terms, to small-boat migrants crossing the Channel. Listening to them attack Badenoch in private, it becomes clear that for some Conservatives Badenoch is a proxy for their fears about migration – and worse. There is a clear strain of racism in these remarks. They cringe when she asserts that her ascent from Nigeria to Tory leadership is proof that Britain still works. Worse, they find it offensive. Britain doesn't work. That's the problem. 'While the idea of Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch was always deeply seductive to a certain kind of Tory,' the former academic and Reform mouthpiece Matt Goodwin wrote in February, unsubtly implying that Badenoch is not British by using her full name, 'The idea of Kemi Badenoch is definitely not igniting the same reaction out there in the wider country.' The optimism that marked an older generation of Conservatives like Fraser Nelson and boosterish Tory leaders like Johnson has given way in certain parts of the right to an astral pessimism about Britain, its demographics and its future. There is a deep pathos to Badenoch's slow-motion retreat into herself, refusing to face the reality of her position. 'She tries to keep everyone together and they stab her in the back,' said her former staffer. 'You think you belong. You think you are attached to this institution. But it's full of backstabbers.' According to the former staffer, Badenoch does not think the criticism directed at her is racist. After all, if the Conservative Party was racist, how could she have ended up leading it? In February, Nelson, now a columnist at the Times, where he continues to boost Badenoch, appeared on the Triggernometry podcast. Nelson had recently been fighting with the online right on X over mass migration. These younger Conservatives did not like Badenoch. Nelson's sunny conservatism was no longer in vogue. Pushed on migration by the podcast's co-host Konstantin Kisin, Nelson began to talk about 'the concept of Britishness and the project of the United Kingdom'. What is the concept of Britishness, asked Kisin. 'Britain as a country is the cradle of opportunity… it's a place recognised the world over… where you can make whatever you want of your life.' Nelson put forward the idea that outsiders 'like Kemi Badenoch' are better at describing Britain than people born in the country: 'In Kemi's maiden speech she was saying as an African girl she looked to Britain as a shining beacon on a hill, where you could make whatever you wanted of your talents.' It was the latest of several references Nelson has made to the speech since 2017. The idea of Britain as a project, the notion that Britain could only be seen clearly by those who chose to move to the country, that Britain was a 'beacon' or a 'light': Nelson's language was unmistakably similar to Badenoch's speech. 'Kemi is simultaneously Britain's greatest critic and greatest beneficiary of identity politics,' a prominent backbencher told me. She rode the modernisation wave that began to wash over the Tories 20 years ago to the top of the party. 'Francis [Maude] sees her as the ultimate achievement of that period of modernisation,' they said. 'But that model was superficial.' The New Right thinks the modernisers got everything backwards. They gave in to the superficiality of politics in the Noughties, while ignoring the real, structural legacies of Blair's Britain: immigration, the European Convention on Human Rights and, as they see it, the capture of institutions by 'woke' enemies of the Conservative Party. Badenoch was the final offering of modernisation – just as its intellectual underpinnings had collapsed. The result, Badenoch's critics argue, is an anachronism. Her team pinned male and female signs to gender-neutral toilets in the offices where she launched her first leadership campaign in 2022. Three years on, Dominic Cummings and smaller influencers talk openly of a coming civil war fought on ethnic lines. PMQs is where the story Badenoch told about herself has disintegrated most clearly. She has not been a street fighter. Graham Davies, her former performance coach, is aghast at the quality of the clashes between Starmer and Badenoch. After explaining that CCHQ no longer had enough money to pay for his services, Davies said that when it comes to PMQs she 'doesn't do the process, doesn't do the practice and doesn't like it'. He thought it showed. (Badenoch left a glowing review on his website: 'I did everything you said. You are the best presentation coach EVER! So many things you suggested were complimented on. Amazing work you did on me.') His worries about Badenoch stretched beyond PMQs. Davies, who first met Badenoch in 2017, said that she was no longer the same person. When they worked again on her leadership campaign in 2024, he realised that government had changed her. She seemed to have less energy. She was less 'bouncy' than before. Badenoch knows it's going wrong. Ahead of the local elections on 1 May, there were briefings to prepare the ground for what was expected to be a rough day for the Conservative Party. (Her team denies this.) 'They put out there that they expected to lose 400 councillors,' said a source, 'and they ended up losing 700. The expectation management was way off.' The Tories lost 16 councils. One prominent backbencher said that Tory MPs spent a lot of time inside a 'fever dream… lazily speculating' about whether Farage might save them by dying before the next election. Burghart has been overheard in the Palace of Westminster wondering whether an 'exogenous event' might save his party. No one I spoke to believed she would lead the party into the next election. Badenoch loves the party, but it no longer loves her. The briefings against her question her Britishness: they pick up on her habit of drinking warm Coke Zeroes, putting four sugars in her tea, buttering every item on her English breakfasts (apart from toast), condemning sandwiches as 'not real food'. In their view, they are small but telling indicators that she does not belong in Britain. 'The disloyalty is astonishing,' said a former staffer. But her failure, ultimately, is one of competence. She has not improved over time because she cannot accept that she is ever wrong. 'I never have gaffes,' she said once, in a comment destined to haunt her. 'I never have to clarify, because I think very carefully about what I say.' The clip has been resurrected several times by members of Reform as they have moved past the Tories to become the unofficial opposition to Labour. The agitation against Badenoch has calmed in past weeks as the parliamentary recess has neared. In her late July reshuffle James Cleverly, despised by some in Badenoch's orbit for what they see as pusillanimous behaviour since the leadership contest, was given top billing in the shadow cabinet. Modernisation is coming full circle: Maude will now advise the leader of the opposition. Lee Rowley, Badenoch's closest confidant, left her office. She will survive her first year as leader. No street fighter: Badenoch has been criticised for her meek attitude at PMQs. Photo: House of Commons/Handout via Reuters On the inside, few believe any of it matters. There is no 'exogenous event' on the horizon. 'Kemi OBLITERATES Starmer…' 'Kemi EXPOSES Starmer…' scream the captions on low-view videos on the Conservative Party's YouTube channel. Badenoch is doing the minimum against Labour and being rewarded with third place in the polls. The most organised elements of her party have drifted away from her. 'People have moved to Jenrick,' admitted the former Badenoch staffer. 'The group of people uninterested in ideology moves like a weird blob. The blob finds a host, eats them alive, moves on.' Gove visited Jenrick's country home over the Easter holidays. The core of her support in the shadow cabinet, said the prominent backbencher, are 'careerists', less committed to a cause than their own advancement: '[Careerists] don't tend to die in a ditch do they?' Other careerists, such as the former party chairman Jake Berry, have decided to join Reform. The former Remainer has discovered a previously hidden devotion to Farage. Berry is a straw, bending tellingly in the wind. Can Maude reverse the long-term decline of the Conservative Party? 'He will brilliantly implement a totally doomed plan,' said the adviser. The polls won't change and nor will the hatred the country feels for the Tory party unless it changes – and not just superficially. There is no plan to deal with this. No plan to deal with further defections to Reform. No plan now, other than one half-formed, regrettable, but rather necessary thought, scratching at the back of the minds of so many Tories: to relieve Kemi Badenoch of the leadership. To go ever further right. To get angrier. To modernise. 'New Britain' is not what it was supposed to be. [See more: Inside Robert Jenrick's New Right revolution] Related
The Independent
31 minutes ago
- The Independent
Hong Kong judge rules in favor of transgender bathroom access
A Hong Kong judge on Wednesday ruled to strike down regulations criminalizing the use of bathrooms designated for the opposite sex, ruling in favor of transgender individuals' rights to access public toilets matching their identity. Judge Russell Coleman approved the judicial review of K, who was born a woman and identifies as a man, saying the regulations contravene an article of the city's mini-constitution that stipulates all residents should be equal before the law. But he suspended the declaration to strike down the regulations for a year to allow the government 'to consider whether it wishes to implement a way to deal with the contravention.' He said in the judgement that the regulations and 'drawing the line of a person's biological sex at birth create a disproportionate and unnecessary intrusion into the privacy and equality rights." The ruling marks another step forward in recognizing the rights of LGBTQ+ people in the Chinese financial hub. In recent years, the government has revised policies following activists' wins in legal challenges. Currently, only children under 5 years old accompanied by an opposite sex adult can enter a public washroom designated for the opposite sex. Those violating the rule face a fine of up to 2,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $255). K launched a legal challenge in 2022, seeking to expand the exemption to pre-operative transgender people who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and have a medical need to undergo the process of living in their identified gender. He argued that his constitutional rights were infringed by the prohibition against him using public toilets allocated for men, the court heard. In 2023, Hong Kong's top court ruled that full sex reassignment surgery should not be a prerequisite for transgender people to have their gender changed on their official identity cards. The next year, the government revised its policy to allow people who have not completed full gender-affirmation surgery to change their genders on ID cards as long as they fulfill certain conditions. The conditions include the removal of breasts for transgender men, the removal of the penis and testes for transgender women, and having undergone continuous hormonal treatment for at least two years before applying. Applicants also have to continue their hormonal treatment and submit blood test reports for random checks upon the government's request. In April, activist Henry Tse, who won the legal battle in 2023 and received his new ID card reflecting his gender change last year, lodged a fresh legal challenge over the new requirements.
