View from the Lords, with LORD GREAVES

ONE wet evening my umbrella went missing in the Lords. No great loss, just an ordinary Boundary Mill brolly, but I did wonder about the class of people in the House...

It turned up some weeks later. The doorkeeper told me that my brolly-pincher was a quite famous Labour peer. He had apparently "sent his man round to return it". I was grateful of course, but wondered again about a world in which people have a "man" to do such things.

Actually the Lords is a very egalitarian place. At first I was surprised by this but peers are indeed accepted as "peers", whatever their background.

We all mix on an equal basis and, more importantly, listen to each other with care and respect in the chamber. But we still have a goodly ration of toffs, not all of them amongst the 92 surviving hereditaries. Last Tuesday was the first of no fewer than six days allocated for the hunting debate. My colleague and former party leader Lord Steel complained that some of the anti-hunting MPs were more interested in going for toffs than in banning hunting. "There might be more basis for a bill banning toffs than one banning hunting!" he said.

Six or seven times MPs have voted to ban hunting. The Lords will again vote out their bill, although I will vote against hunting. What's it all about? Class? Urban versus rural? A generation gap? Whatever, it is hardly a huge constitutional issue to compare with the epic battles of Asquith and Lloyd George in the "peers versus people" conflicts of a hundred years ago. As I said in the House on Tuesday, if that was Hamlet, this is a pantomime.

On Thursday I rushed back for a meeting of the Colne area committee. I left my hat outside the chamber and when I came out - guess what? Perhaps the different worlds are not so different after all! I am left wondering - does my Colne hat thief employ a "man"?