Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)

My Lords, I feel I am again swimming against the current, but I am very much against having an age limit in this House. I feel it would leave us poorer, thinner and more meagre. I am delighted that Ministers appear determined to break their manifesto commitment on the subject, and I urge them to take the same wise, measured and judicious attitude to the stuff on the other side of the full stop which my noble friend Lord Dobbs was mentioning earlier. We would be deprived of a great deal in this House without the wisdom of the full range of our Members. He is not here at the moment, so I hope it will not embarrass him in his absence if I say that the best speech I heard in tonight’s debate came from the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, with his erudition and his experience, explaining the role of the Crown prerogative in appointing Members of this House. Again, I hope that he will not think this in any way impertinent, but he would fall on the wrong side of my noble friend Lord Hailsham’s age limit, and I think we would all be the poorer for it. My noble friend Lord Parkinson spoke about a multigenerational Chamber; I think there is a real importance in having a multigenerational polity. It is important in an age when elected politicians are becoming younger, the 24-hour news cycle and social media are more exhausting and elected politics becomes more of a young man’s game to have a space in our national discourse for people from every generation. It is kind of a variant, if you like, of Burke’s point about a nation being a partnership between the dead, the unborn and the living.