James Landale

And the royal family was very popular in those days.

And secondly, getting rid of hereditary peers.

That was seen as a sort of, it was a sort of physical manifestation of oldness that new labor was the solution to.

And then I remember them all telling me, oh, we're going to get rid of the whole House of Lords.

We're going to get rid of all the flummery and all this.

And of course, the moment they got in, they fell in love with it and sort of rather liked it.

as everybody always does.

And then realised they could create their own peers too.

And could create their own peers.

And I remember, and then so Tony Blair sort of set off to sort of get rid of hereditary peers.

And then, of course, the peers brilliantly fought a rearguard action, as the British aristocracy had done ever since the early 1800s, you know, during the Reform Acts and all that, where they ceded power

inch by inch, bill by bill, from the Reform Acts and then up to the legislation in the early 1900s when the House of Lords had some of its powers constrained and all of this sort of thing.

And exactly the same thing happened in the late 1990s.

And Tony Blair thought he was getting rid of the hereditaries then.

But a guy called at the time, his name was Robert Cranbourne, Lord Cranbourne.

He's now Robert Salisbury or Lord Salisbury.

And he was the leader of the Conservative leader in the House of Lords.

And this was the era when William Hague was prime minister.

And he basically did- William Hague was leader of the opposition.

Wanted to be prime minister.