Bollettino

We are all anti-monarchists around here. But we've been deeply affected by the NYT article on old peers who are seeking their old seats again in Tony Blair's New-n-improved House of Lords. Politics is one thing -- but seeing the spiritual descendents of Bertie Wooster in a fix is quite another.

"LONDON, March 25 � "Quite obviously, I haven't got a hope of getting elected, or of getting any votes at all," said Viscount Massereene, describing his curiously languid attempt to win back (or not) his former seat in the House of Lords. "I thought I would put my name down as a bit of a statement."

One's heart rather goes out, in a hail fellow well met way, not a get the hankies out way, nothing like that, to Viscount Massereene. Especially when you compare his idea that he would rather like, all things considered, to be as it were warming the old seat up again to the barking of the young, buff shark, obviously some New Labor suit, who sounds like a typical thug:

"It's a farcical situation," said Alex Runswick, policy officer for Charter 88, a group that campaigns for electoral reform. "You've got a situation where 91 hereditary peers who shouldn't be there anyway are able to vote for other people who shouldn't be there either."

Get the old folks out of the home. That's a very typical Blair-ite message -- and of course we are talking of the real Blair, who as readers of this site know is struggling in his bonds in the Scottish castle, and not the Blair double who is conferring today with Bush, and no doubt secretly with his maker, Richard Perle.


Finally, there is this graf. We fell in love with this graf -- we lost our aversion to the aristocracy with this graf:

'Meanwhile, the Earl of Stockton has joined some candidates in sending statements to potential voters, gingerly enumerating his qualifications.

"I hope to steer a rather elegant course between the Scylla of self-promotion and the Charybdis of boastfulness," said the earl, who already has a full-time job as a Conservative member of the European Parliament. "I'm also very fortunate to have a brother-in-law in the Lords who's putting in a good word for me."

The results of the election, decided by a system of weighted voting that is so convoluted as to be unintelligible, will be announced on Thursday."

If we must barge into countries and tell them how to run themselves, surely the plight of the House of Lords should move our Pentagon planners. Any politician who ponders the elegant course between the Scylla of self-promotion and the Charybdis of boastfulness -- and can actually say that, like that, to a reporter -- should be supported with all the weapons in our arsenal.