Women peers speak out

The female peers of the House of Lords have come to the fore in their influence on major coalition bills on health, welfare and legal aid. But is there a danger that the experience and wisdom they bring to the upper chamber could be lost in the rush to reform? Staying power: Baroness Trumpington, aka Jean Barker. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer The redoubtable Jean Alys Barker, Baroness Trumpington of Sandwich, in the County of Kent – Trumpers to her friends – was made a Conservative peer in 1980. She was in Strasbourg at a conference when she heard. "The British consul rang me and told me that my husband had desperately been trying to get through to me," she says. "She obviously thought it was bad news. For some reason, I didn't do anything. But he called again at midnight – he was as drunk as a skunk by then – and he said: 'Darling! You're going to the House of Lords.' Well, you can imagine. I didn't get a wink of sleep." Was she pleased? Suddenly girlish, she casts me a look of purest delight. "Oh, I was absolutely thrilled!" Her peerage acknowledged a lifetime of service. During the war, she worked first as a land girl – she shows me a photograph of herself, aged 17, in high-waisted trousers, a trug over her arm, talking shyly to Lloyd George – and later at Bletchley Park, where she was part of the team that cracked the German U-boat code ("We would have starved to death, no question, if we hadn't got it," she says). Afterwards, she was a Cambridge city councillor for more than a decade, and served as the town's mayor, as well as, among many other things, a justice of the peace; a member of both the board of visitors at Pentonville prison and the mental health review tribunal; and the chairwoman of the airline users committee. But it also marked the beginning of a whole new career. There followed a series of government jobs: as a whip, as a parliamentary undersecretary at the Department of Health, and as a minister of state at the Department of Agriculture (in the last year of that appointment, aged 69, she became the oldest ever female minister). Today, she is an extra baroness-in-waiting to the Queen – the role requires her to greet visiting heads of state on behalf of the monarch – and she continues to travel daily to the Lords whenever the house is sitting. "The wonderful thing is," she says, "that age doesn't matter here." Does she still make speeches? You bet she does. "I spoke the other day on this Sunday trading bill for the Olympics. I know all about Sunday trading from the 80s, of course. It was rather fun. I started my speech: 'Fuss, fuss, fuss, my Lords.' They were being so silly, acting like it was going to bring in [full] Sunday trading by the back door, when that wasn't it at all." Among her colleagues, Baroness Trumpington is known for her sense of mischief, and for her plain speaking. Last November, you will recall, she was caught on camera giving a V-sign to Lord King after he referred to her advanced age during a Remembrance Day debate. "I don't do things for the public," she says, when I ask about this. "It was entirely between him and me, I thought. It was very, very discreet." Slowly, gracefully, she repeats the salute in full for my benefit – which is very funny because, at the time, she insisted it was a mistake, that her hand had unaccountably "flown up". Did she think he was being rude? "Yes, I thought he was being bloody rude." So what does she think about the government's plan to reform the Lords? Straight-backed in her chair, she rolls her eyes. The coalition is, she says, a "pain in the neck … the days are longer, things are more drawn out, a lot of the time it's just plain 'your turn, Charlie.'" (During one particularly late vote, or so I've heard tell, she turned to her neighbour and said: "This is like the blitz – only without the sex, of course.") As for the report published by the joint committee on the draft House of Lords reform bill – it proposes a smaller chamber; 80% of peers would be elected, to serve 15-year terms – she considers it a dog's dinner, the result of yet another silly deal with the Liberal Democrats. "It isn't good enough! We debated it, and various people have said [to me] that Lord Wallace's summing up [a Liberal Democrat peer, he is a government whip] was the worst they'd ever heard." The government, though, is determined to press on: Lord's reform represented a key section of the Queen's speech last week, in spite of the warnings of some Tory MPs, who think it a crazy and expensive distraction. Will Baroness Trumpington join those peers already mobilising against it? No doubt she will. But as she points out, for her, this would be a matter of principle rather than political opportunism; it would be unwise to make predictable jokes about turkeys and their reluctance to vote for Christmas in her presence. "I'm 89, my dear. Whatever happens, I'm unlikely to be around to see it. Though I would very much like to return to the Lords as a ghost." My first day at the Palace of Westminster. I'm here to interview women peers, newly and triumphantly visible thanks to their determined attempts to revise a series of mammoth – and, some would say, extremely badly drafted – government bills (health, welfare, legal aid). But no sooner have I arrived than all the talk is of reform. What do I think about this? I think that, in 2012, replacing an unelected chamber with an elected one is, or should be, a no-brainer, and that it would be embarrassing to argue otherwise. Initial impressions only reinforce this. From a gallery high above the chamber, I watch a bishop checking the weather forecast on his iPhone, and think how odd it is that there is still an element of theocracy in our law-making. Hard to ignore, too, that the place seems, at first, like little more than a retirement home for MPs. (Hello, Ann Taylor and Beverley Hughes – I wondered where you'd gone! Coo-ee! John Prescott, looking just as cheery as ever.) Later, at the committee on communications, where two experts are giving evidence about broadband speeds, I experience a jolt of indignation as Melvyn Bragg takes his seat beside the Earl of Selborne – which one of them, I wonder, knows more about Britain's digital future? – though admittedly, I'm soon distracted by the far more transfixing sight of Baroness Fookes, the former Conservative MP, eyes shut (though surely not asleep?) as the witnesses are talking, her sea-green eyelids dropping like an expensive pair of roman blinds. But then I start talking to people, and the ground starts to shift beneath my feet. I go native! Leaving aside both the constitutional arguments – an elected second chamber would be able to claim parity with the Commons, something that could cause legislative gridlock – and the logistics – how much is all this going to cost? – it's difficult to see how an elected House of Lords would be any different from an elected House of Commons given that, in order to stand, potential candidates will feel they need a party behind them. And what will that mean? Certainly, it will be more "democratic" (though 15-year terms would make it equally difficult ever to turf anyone out). But will it be as wise, as learned, or even as diverse? Will it have the same sense of perspective? I doubt it, and so does every woman I meet, even those of them who are broadly in favour of reform. In the soothing gloom of the peers' guestroom, I ask Molly Meacher, a crossbencher and former social worker who has won widespread praise for her dogged work on the health and welfare bills, if she would consider standing for election (some crossbenchers are appointed by independent committee; Meacher is pro-reform, but fears that this government's approach to it will be "thoughtless and destructive" as a quid pro quo for Lib Dem support). "No, I wouldn't think of it!" she all but yelps. "None of the crossbenchers would – and yet it's there that you've got the greatest levels of expertise: the judges, the police officers, the doctors, the lawyers." Under the current proposals, there would still be appointed crossbenchers, but their numbers would fall from 186 to 90. "I'm game, I'd stand," says Ruth Deech, another of their number (Deech, a constitutional lawyer, is a former chairwoman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and a former principal of St Anne's College, Oxford). "But I wouldn't get in. If you don't have the party machinery, you can't do it. So if we move to an elected chamber, we'll lose the independents. There probably wouldn't be as many women, or as many people from ethnic minorities, and there certainly wouldn't be as many disabled peers." Elected peers would also be less free-thinking, less rebellious, their consciences buckling beneath the might of the party whips. "As a crossbencher, you're always in opposition," says Tanni Grey-Thompson, the former para-Olympian. "That's quite cool. I vote however I like." It was thanks, in part, to Grey-Thompson that the government's legal aid bill suffered 14 defeats in the Lords before it finally passed into law late last month. "We [crossbenchers] dislike the fact that the parties don't attend debates, and then just come in and vote," says Mary Warnock, the philosopher, who also sits on the crossbenches. "This is why I loathe the idea of an elected house. It's bad enough that both parties have taken to coming and addressing us at our weekly meeting – pretending, of course, that it's a great privilege to do so. We're increasingly reluctant to let them because they just try to twist our arms." The huge influx of former MPs since 2010 – David Cameron has created more peers more quickly than any other postwar prime minister – is already ruining the Lords' capacity for thoughtful and serious debate, without the parties further strengthening their grip. "They don't understand that we don't go in for filibustering. Speeches made at such length." Warnock grimaces theatrically. "They stand there telling us the story of their life, anecdote after anecdote. It's appalling!" With its dining rooms and its bars, its library and its deferential staff, the Lords is exceedingly convivial – the best club in London, or so the saying goes. According to Deech, something about the building – so opulent, so optimistic, so deeply Victorian – makes her feel "a special obligation to do my best". But since it's still largely full of privileged white males – about 25% of its membership is female, though the situation isn't any worse, these days, than in the Commons – isn't it also, sometimes, a difficult place to be? I'm amazed by her answer. "This is one of the most egalitarian institutions I've ever worked in," she says. "The speaker is a woman, as was her predecessor; the convenor of the crossbenchers is a woman; the shadow leader of the house is a woman; there are 30 women in top positions. It's true that there's something of an old public school atmosphere, and I'm normally the first to criticise that sort of thing, but it really is egalitarian." But she isn't alone. Tina Stowell, a Conservative peer and government whip, tells me: "I don't ever get the sense there's any kind of misogyny here." Meacher says that by the time they reach the Lords, most people have already achieved all they are going to in life; as a result, the atmosphere is less competitive than it might be, and thus more equal. "I think we're out of the flirty stage," says Joan Bakewell, a Labour peer. "We relate to the men, and they to us, only via the business we are doing." Grey-Thompson says: "Outside, people see me approaching, and think: 'Oh, God! It's her!' But inside … they listen, and with respect." Only Lola Young, a crossbencher who is pro-reform, casts any doubt. "Some people don't think you should be here," she says. "But that's their problem. I've got a vote, just as Margaret Thatcher has got a vote." What strikes me about all of them is their willingness to speak frankly (these are not the timid, boring robots you find in the Commons), the depth of their knowledge (unlike the new generation of MPs, they have had long careers in the outside world), and the wide range of their backgrounds. Deech is the daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany; Young is busy writing about a book about her extraordinarily difficult childhood; Meacher didn't get her degree until after she had children. Bakewell, a relatively new peer, still has to pinch herself that she is here, even after a lifetime on our television screens. "My grandfather was a cooper in a brewery," she says, with a smile. Stowell, a former head of corporate affairs at the BBC, grew up in Beeston, Nottinghamshire; her father was a painter and decorator, her mother a factory worker (Cameron made her a peer in 2011, after she failed to be selected for a parliamentary seat). She left school at 16, and her began her working life as a secretary. "After I was introduced to the Lords, we had a lunch. My dad was sitting next to George Osborne, my mum next to William Hague, my brother next to Seb Coe. To me, it was quite wonderful. I feel people are very detached from politicians. I'm concerned they're losing faith with what they believe to be right, and I'm very sincere in wanting to give them a voice." The Tories are extremely lucky to have her, and must know it. What will happen to these women, and others like them, if the Lords are reformed? Stowell and Grey-Thompson are the only ones I can see standing successfully for election. In a world in which women who are over 50 are too often seen as being on the scrapheap, the Lords acts as a kind of glorious corrective. It pounces on their talents, picking their brains, pushing them forward. Back in her immaculate Battersea flat, Baroness Trumpington is showing me more photographs. Here she is with Ted Heath. Here she is – in the most extraordinary hat – with John Major. And here she is sitting next but one to the Queen at a state banquet. Whatever the future brings, there is a sense in which she, at least, will have seen it all before – a bird's eye view we would be foolish to ignore. "I've worked away at a hell of a lot of things in my life," she says, now, in her wonderfully sonorous voice. "And one thing is for sure. Politics is not the beginning and the end of everything, and nor should it be."