Noblesse Obliged

When his father's death made him a viscount in 1960, a popular, promising Labor M.P. named Anthony Wedgwood Benn rocked the Debrett set by declaring vehemently that he wanted no part of the peerage. Reason: lords, lunatics, criminals and minors are barred from sitting in the House of Commons, where political careers are made and most Cabinet ministers chosen.

"Wedgy" Benn. then 35. refused to become Lord Stansgate and take his seat in the House of Lords, the largely ceremonial upper house that has been called "the last infirmary of noble minds." Instead, Mister Wedgwood Benn, as he insisted on calling himself, ran for re-election from Bristol South-East, and easily won. But the High Court ruled that a peer's male heir, ''lawfully begotten," may not renounce his title. Protesting that he was thus ''the victim of my father's virtue." "the Reluctant Peer'' was forced to stand aside while the defeated Tory candidate occupied his seat in Commons.

Last week, as a direct result of Wedgwood Benn's battle to remain a commoner, a joint parliamentary committee proposed new rules for the Lords. Its key recommendation: hereditary peers should henceforth be allowed to surrender their titles for life and run for Commons if they wish. The change seems almost certain to pass into law. For though most Tories are reluctant to adopt a measure that might make the Lords even more ineffectual than at present, they fear that unless it is reformed, a future socialist government may abolish the Lords altogether on the ground that an upper chamber based on inheritance is a feudal relic that has no place in a modern democracy.

The Absentees. In fact. The Other Place, as the Lords is known in Commons, has been stripped of real power since the 1832 Reform Act, which brought effective democracy to Britain by making its government responsible only to the House of Commons. Today the Lords resembles a sumptuously somnolent club that is made all the more exclusive by the fact that it can accommodate only a fraction of the 931 dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, barons, bishops ("lords spiritual") and judges who are technically entitled to sit in its hallowed gilt and crimson chamber.

Most of them are bored by political debate and seldom show up. On the other hand, several able, politically-minded aristocrats who refuse to sit in the Lords have joined Wedgwood Benn's boycott with the express aim of changing the system. Among them: Lord Hinchingbrooke, a lively Tory rebel who lost his Commons seat this year when he became the tenth Earl of Sandwich, and Lord Altrincham, a trenchant anti-Establishment columnist for the Liberal Manchester Guardian.

Lethal Chamber. Both major parties would welcome the return to Commons of respected and experienced politicians who have been exiled to The Other Place. Among them: former Tory Party Chairman Viscount Hailsham, now Leader of the House of Lords, who as Quintin Hogg, M.P., was a longtime star of Commons debates, and Foreign Secretary Lord Home, who was a lackluster Tory M.P. but has made a deep impact on the party in the past two years. In Tory inner circles, both are regarded as among the half-dozen potential candidates to succeed Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

In any case, the changes proposed last week impressed most Britons as a necessary, if overdue, step toward more thoroughgoing reform of "the lethal chamber," as Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith called it in 1911. Displaced M.P. Wedgwood Benn, who has eked out a living as a free-lance writer for the past year, called the committee report "a victory for common sense." When the law is changed, he vowed, "I shall be queuing up with my thermos the moment the doors open."

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