This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Sir Keir Starmer does not dream, and he cannot name a favourite novel or poem, so it is too much to expect him to shed a tear for the wonders of the ancient British constitution he is bent on desecrating.
The latest victims are the 92 hereditary peers spared by Tony Blair, who will lose their seats in the House of Lords when Parliament is prorogued thanks to the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026, a scrap of paper which will in due course be burned at bonfires.
This leaves the 26 lords spiritual as the only elected members of the upper house. Guardian readers will sneer that the archbishops and bishops are elected from single-candidate lists, and failure to elect the Crown’s choice used to be praemunire, for which the ordained punishment was forfeiture of all goods and chattels alongside imprisonment at the pleasure of the king. I note without comment that praemunire was abolished in 1967, and Britain has not been a Great Power since that time.
Another, and less heralded, casualty of Starmer’s class warfare is the House of Lords’ jurisdiction to determine peerage claims, the last remnant of its judicial powers — at least, until impeachments are brought out of abeyance for members of this government.
From next month, dispute over peerage claims will be heard by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council by way of reference under section 4 of the Judicial Committee Act of 1833, the jurisdiction of the House of Lords over these disputes being on the chopping block as a result of the ejection of the 92.
The House’s inherent jurisdiction over peerage claims is ancient. A peerage (except a Scotch or Irish peerage) entitled its holder to sit in the House of Lords (with exceptions: aliens, juveniles, and sometimes, women), so a peerage dispute was really a dispute as to membership of the House.
Although Erskine May glumly states that “[t]he decisions of committees for peerage claims are not judgments and are not binding in another claim”, they used to be published as part of the Law Reports, so it seems churlish to pretend that they are not real case law, much as decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council are decisions, though dressed as advice to the sovereign.
The last peerage claim heard by the House of Lords was the Moynihan case, and since my knowledge of such things will be rendered even more worthless by the abolition of the hereditaries, I will tell the story in some detail.
The barony was created in 1929 for Berkeley Moynihan, a surgeon and co-founder of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society — much in the news as “Dignity in Dying” — the group behind the Leadbeater-Falconer bill. The second baron, a Liberal, died before he could be tried on a charge of cottaging.
His son, the third baron, was also a Liberal. After fleeing Britain upon an arrest warrant being issued, he had sons by his fourth and fifth wives, both in the Philippines, where he ran a brothel and traded in drugs.
The son by his fourth wife was shown by DNA testing — a British invention which has wreaked havoc on the nobility — to have another father. The fourth wife testified that the third baron had low sperm count and speculated a Los Angeles IVF specialist had used the wrong sperm on her.
The barony descended to the heirs male of the body, lawfully begotten. If the son by the fourth wife was not the son of the third baron, the son by the fifth wife would inherit.
However, the fourth Lady Moynihan only learned after he died that she had been divorced in the Tunbridge Wells County Court for adultery; the Family Division of the High Court set aside the decree on the grounds that it had been obtained through fraud by Lord Moynihan.
The son by the fifth marriage, whether biologically related to Lord Moynihan or not, was therefore illegitimate, since the third baron’s fifth marriage was bigamous.
All of this was aired at length in front of four law lords in 1997, when the third baron’s half-brother, Colin Moynihan, a former Conservative minister, proved his right to the peerage, having knocked out the aforementioned two Filipino boys, aged 7 and 12, the child of his half-brother’s fourth wife having been born after the child of his purported fifth wife.
Now, the fifth Lord Moynihan, the silver-medal-winning cox at the Moscow Olympics and later chairman of the British Olympic Committee, will be expelled from the House of Lords.
Mock all you want, but this still is a better and far more dignified system of selecting Britain’s legislators for life than the one which put the likes of Peter Mandelson and Ann Limb in ermine.
