Sir Keir Starmer promised during the general election campaign to completely abolish the Lords in his first parliament and replace them with an elected body.
However, his first reform will impose an 80-year retirement age and remove the last 92 hereditary peers, who hold their positions by virtue of inherited titles.
Baroness Harman, a co-host of News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast and a recent Labour peer, expressed her happiness to be on the red benches.
“I am really heading up to that fast so I’ll have to have a new reinvention,” she added, adding that she was “signed up” to her party’s intentions for “people not going on beyond 80” in the chamber.
My mother claimed that since I’m 73 years old and she lived to reach 100, I essentially have three decades left to live. I will thus need to reinvent myself.
Ruth Davidson, a Tory peer and fellow podcast host, said she understood some of her older peers’ questions about why there should be an arbitrary cutoff because some people are “very bright as a button” and some of them were “very active in the House—perhaps more active than some of the younger peers who are at a different stage in their careers.”
