"In a Decent, British Manner "

When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte, As every child can tell, The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular And did it very well. . . .

--lolanthe

In the crowded House of Lords one day last week, more than 200 barons, viscounts, earls, marquesses and dukes sat like sardines. The noble lords were aroused. Shaking his mittened hands, 83-year-old Viscount Cecil of Chelwood inveighed against tyranny. Cried he: "What happened in Berlin yesterday and Moscow today may well happen in London tomorrow!" What was up? It was the perennial question: Would the ornamental House of Lords be allowed to continue their nothing-in-particular in Clem Attlee's day as they had in Wellington's?

From Cecil to Cecil. For centuries the House of Commons had been whittling away at the Lords' powers. Now the Socialist government was at it. The Lords' power of veto went in 1911, but they could still delay legislation. Labor was out to clip this delaying period from two years to one. The Lords suspected another aim: to draw the Lords' last teeth and leave the hereditary House as a Blimpish appendage--or even abolish it altogether.

Against this latest encroachment the Conservative Lords were arrayed in depth. Up rose another Cecil--slim Robert Arthur James Gascoyne-Cecil, fifth Marquess of Salisbury, one of England's ablest peers.* The history and traditions of twelve Salisbury generations were behind him. The first earl had been a trusted minister of Queen Elizabeth. The third marquess had been one of Victoria's prime ministers. Now long-nosed "Bobbety" Cecil was demanding that the Labor government withdraw its bill.

He pressed hard on red-faced, 78-year-old Labor Lord Addison to agree to a delay and a conference. His object: to reform the House of Lords the Tory way. A conference would probably result in a compromise: cutting the present membership by more than half, allowing hereditary peers to elect parliamentary representatives from their own ranks (as Scottish peers do), balancing the reduced hereditary element by creating more Laborite peers.

"Some Ordinary Blokes." Lord Addison conferred with Labor's Herbert Morrison. Labor would agree to a conference, on condition that it would not affect the progress of the bill to clip the Lords' powers. That was not satisfactory to the Tory Lords. Debate ranged wide. Lord Lindsay of Birker, who is also the learned Master of Oxford's Balliol College, needled the aristocrats. What the House of Lords needed, he suggested, was "some ordinary blokes."

After much haggling, Lord Addison read a new statement of Labor's policy. He agreed to the conference the Tories wanted, dodged the question of clipping the peers' powers. The Addison formula: "The discussion of the powers of the [Lords] should be limited to ensuring reasonable time for the due performance of their functions. . . ." This was magnificent bureaucratic jabberwocky, but everybody agreed that it was a compromise : the House of Lords was going to be reformed, and Labor would let the Tories have a say in it. Said,the Marquess of Salisbury: change would now come "in a decent, orderly British manner."

* Longtime statesman, Eton-&-Oxford-trained Robert Cecil, 54, is better known as Viscount Cranborne (the honorary title he used until he succeeded his father as the Marquess of Salisbury ten months ago). He resigned as Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs (along with his boss Anthony Eden) in protest against appeasement of Italy in 1938. Two years later he returned to office as Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs.

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