IT WOULD be interesting to know the exact timing of the videos in which John Sewel, as we are now entitled to call him, consorted with prostitutes and sniffed cocaine in his taxpayer-subsidised flat in Pimlico.
If what some newspapers are pleased to call his “romps” had happened just a few weeks ago he could have clung on to his peerage, as the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension Act) 2015 only came into force at the end of last month and is not retrospective.
That is why Lords Watson (fire-raising) and Archer (perjury) still sit in our esteemed Upper Chamber in spite of having served time in prison. Sewel resigned, he said, “to help repair the damage I have done to an institution I hold dear.”
Good luck with that. Decreasing numbers hold this institution in any affection whatever, and this is set to worsen when the Prime Minister begins creating the next raft of Tory Peers to make the Lords match his Commons majority, a ridiculous swelling of the numbers which has accelerated once more under his premiership after the cull as part of the Blair Government reform in 2000.
Sewel has not cut an attractive figure in these sordid revelations, boasting to prostitutes about his serial adultery, whingeing about his Lords pay, and both racist and misogynist when talking about Asian women. He earned £84,500 as Deputy Speaker of the Upper Chamber and for convening — irony alert — the Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee. And yet he was taped complaining to women who found themselves as sex workers that he felt underpaid, which he did in a flat for which he received a £36,000 public subsidy.
Until these sordid revelations few In England will have even heard of John Buttifant Sewel, but he gave his name to the legislative consent motion whereby MSPs vote to agree to allow Westminster to make law in areas which are in the competence of the Scottish Parliament. His academic career brought him to Aberdeen where became a Labour council leader and Cosla President, before being made a Labour peer piloting the Scotland Act through Parliament.
In this he worked closely with Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar. We can only imagine what the late First Minister would have made of his colleague’s future aberrations, but what is not in doubt is the significant role Sewel played in our constitutional reforms.
Is it too much to hope that his spectacular downfall could now hasten reform of the House of Lords? He was, after all, not simply a working peer. He was not only Deputy Speaker of that chamber, he was the chairman of the committee charged with overseeing the conduct of his fellow members.
The argument must now move on beyond the Lords power to expel members to the essence of what the place is for. If it is to be a genuine reforming Upper Chamber then the mass appointment of cronies must cease and it must be a smaller, elected body, ideally representing the nations and regions within a federal system.
It took police with battering rams and sniffer dogs at the door of his grace-and-favour flat to convince John Sewel that the gig was up. It may take the crude political equivalent of that to persuade this Government of the need for reform.
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