Elephants' Graveyard

Hang out more flags! Yes, it’s time for a celebration because New Labour are actually going to keep an election promise. This very fact makes these weird and wonderful times but, knowing that he’s going to clean out the elephants’ graveyard is the double vodka in the tomato juice.

Yes, at long last, someone is going to do something about the House of Lords. All right, so he’s only going to get rid of the hereditary peers, which means that Thatcher, Callaghan and Lord ‘Dr. Death’ Owen will still be around, but it’s a start.

I know we’re going to hear lots of hogwash about the ‘noble calling’ of the average hereditary peer, but what right does someone descended from the third mistress of one of our dodgier monarchs have to pass laws that affect the rest of us? We are also going to hear about the ‘representative’ nature of hereditary peers, but I don’t see any thing representative about a bunch of decaying Tories, not when most of them own huge tracts of land or went to Eton, or Oxbridge or The Guards or all three. Work in a factory? Fat chance.

The Lords have always been a pretty dire bunch. For every Byron there has been a hundred reactionary dunderheads like Liverpool or Castlereagh. And, on the subject of Byron, he helped fight for Greek Independence, but Lord Elgin, a far more typical aristocrat, nicked the marbles from the Acropolis.

But let’s not stop there, not when the rogues gallery goes on and on. How about Lord Queensberry, a man known for boxing and hounding Oscar Wilde? Or what about Earl Haig, a man of whisky and the butcher of the Great War? How can I leave out the Duke of Wellington, a man who gave a whole new and nasty meaning to the word reactionary? These people believed that they were born to rule and never expected a public school educated, Oxbridge graduate trained lawyer actually to mean it when he said that he was going to clean out the elephant’s graveyard. They were wrong. Nice one Tony.