Peers

I am dead: dead, but in the Elysian fields.
Benjamin Disraeli on his move to the House of Lords. Attrib.

The House of Lords is like heaven – you want to get there some day, but not while there is any life in you.
Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls

They that hated the Bishops hated them worse than the devil, and they that loved them loved them not so well as their dinner.
Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Faulkland on failing to defeat a late-night Lords vote to curtail bishops’ voting rights in 1641

The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days.
Clement Attlee. Attrib.

Every man has a House of Lords in his own head. Fears, prejudices, misconceptions – those are the peers, and they are hereditary.
David Lloyd George

Historical throwbacks and hillbilly inbreds.
Tony McNulty MP on hereditary peers

An ermine-lined dustbin, an up-market geriatric home with a faint smell of urine.
Austin Mitchell MP on the House of Lords

Last week, The Lord jetted in from New York to vote in support of tax credit cuts for the working poor … The last time Webber voted was for same-sex marriage – so he loves gays but hates the poor. Anyone would think The Lord cared only about his audiences.
Bridget Christie on Andrew Lloyd Webber

TIM SAINSBURY: (Seeing Nicholas Soames in his hunting dress) Going rat-catching, Nick?
NICHOLAS SOAMES: Fuck off, you grocer: you don’t tell a gentleman how to dress on a Friday.
Exchange in the Palace of Westminster between Nicholas Soames MP, grandson of Winston Churchill, and Tim Sainsbury MP of the supermarket dynasty

When I want a peerage I shall buy one like any honest man.
Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe

Let me be thankful, God, that I am not
A Labour Leader when his life-work ends,
Who contemplates the coronet he got
By being false to principles and friends;
Who fought for forty years a desperate fight
With words that seared and stung and slew like swords,
And at the end, with victory in sight,
Ate them – a mushroom viscount in the Lords.
William Kean Seymour, Viscount Demos

Other people’s opinions matter less – unless they’re medical.
Baroness Trumpington on the benefits of ageing