It is tricky in modern Britain to defend the existence of hereditary peers, but the Earl of Devon will have a very good go.
The 49-year-old earl – Charles Peregrine Courtenay, an affable, 6ft 6in intellectual property lawyer who lives in a medieval castle – entered the House of Lords in 2018 when he was working for a US firm.
His bosses did not like the idea of employing a litigator who was also a legislator, until he used American history against them. “I pointed out, if I was a Native American tribal chief, right, my father died, and I was called into the council of elders, it would not be fair to fire me from my job just because I’m playing some traditional cultural role within my community,” he says.
“The Earl of Devon’s nothing different. We’ve been doing this job for 900 years. It’s like, this is our culture, and so to go and sort of discriminate against us for that reason, seems a little bit harsh.”
If Keir Starmer has his way, Courtenay will be among the last hereditaries to sit in the House of Lords. “I’d be surprised if there’s anybody that can make a halfway decent argument for hereditary peers,” Starmer said in 2022.
Courtenay disagrees, arguing that he and his colleagues “bring a slightly unexpected diversity to the house in terms of our skills”. He points to Lord Hampton (John Pakington), who is a head of department at Mossbourne Community Academy state school in east London, and the nuclear engineer Lord Ravensdale (Daniel Mosley, the great-grandson of Oswald Mosley).
A few weeks ago, the government introduced a bill to abolish the final 92 hereditaries. If it passes, there will soon be no more dukes or earls scrutinising legislation in parliament’s second chamber.
Courtenay, a cross-bencher whose family shield includes three red spots to represent “three spots of Christ’s blood that we brought back from the First Crusade”, says he “regrets” Starmer’s determination to make him redundant.
He thinks it offers just “short-term political gain”, in changing the political balance of the House of Lords. Of the 805 sitting peers, 276 are Tories (of which 45 are hereditaries) compared with Labour’s 185.
Take away the hereditaries and what remains, he asks? The bishops and the “life peers”, political appointees who he says “have got there for whatever nefarious reasons”.
He warms to his theme. “There was an interesting debate the other day about the hereditary peerages, and someone stood up and said: ‘You know these people, how did they get here, these hereditary peers?’ And I happened to be sat next to the Duke of Wellington. It’s very obvious how he got here. You know, the Duke of Wellington, there’s a picture of him [in the Lords] at the Battle of Waterloo? It’s like, how do the rest of them get here? You never really know.”
The hereditaries take a long view, he argues, as “a group of people who aren’t in it for themselves or for this generation or for their own. We have a longer horizon, probably, than other people within the house. We look at things in 100, 200, 300-year horizons.”
He cites the environment, a pet subject as a farmer of his 3,500-acre estate. “The problem with the modern environment is everybody’s looking at financial returns, political cycles. Everything’s five, 10 years. Well, what about future generations? How do you get that vision into our policy? And one way you do that is have some people, a small group, who have been doing it for centuries.”
He is against an elected second chamber, which he thinks would create “tension between the Commons and the Lords as to who actually speaks on behalf of the people”. But he thinks the Lords should certainly be more regionally representative, with peers chosen for their professional expertise rather than their political patronage.
His ancestors have been serving monarchs since the Empress Matilda in 1142. He has three older sisters who were not allowed to inherit the right to sit in the Lords, nor the family seat, Powderham Castle. He knows it’s not a great look: “We are poster children for the patriarchal nature of male primogeniture.”
Courtenay, who wears a badge bearing an LGBT rainbow over Powderham, thinks the first-born child should prevail – “regardless of gender, which obviously, you know, in the modern day and age, it’s not a binary issue.”
He knows it is anachronistic that the 92 hereditaries are all white men. But, he says: “We’re only white guys because we’re not allowed to be white females, and that’s through no fault of our own.”
He argues it would be easy for the king or parliament to change the rules of succession. And so “to point at us and say, haha, you’re all men … that’s discrimination of the worst sort in many respects”.
Since 1999, when Tony Blair whittled the number of hereditary peers down to 92, any time a sitting hereditary peer retires or dies, it triggers a peculiar byelection process in which the remaining hereditaries can put themselves forward with a 70-word manifesto.
Some are pleasingly eccentric – in 2015 the Earl of Limerick submitted … a limerick. Courtenay’s entry was rather more workaday, selling himself as “an able advocate and determinedly independent”.
He won having already moved back to the UK in 2014 with his two young children and then-wife, AJ Langer, who starred in the second series of Baywatch as well as cult 90s series My So-Called Life.
He parted amicably with his US bosses and moved to a UK-based law firm relaxed about him working part-time alongside sittings in the House of Lords and running Powderham, which he rents out for weddings and major events such as Radio 1’s Big Weekend.
He knows his days as a hereditary peer are numbered. “I don’t take this lightly,” he says. “It is a ridiculous privilege, and I’m not shy of noticing that, yes, in many people’s eyes, it is anachronistic, and this [the abolition] is progress.”
