Betty Boothroyd wanted to use her valedictory speech in the House of Lords to criticise prime ministers for giving too many peerages to friends and those with “fat bank accounts” who had bankrolled the party in power. The former speaker of the House of Commons planned her final speech, in which she also said there was no longer a place for hereditary peers, but was too ill to deliver it. Lady Boothroyd, who died last February, had agreed the final draft and her former secretary, Sir Nicholas Bevan, has now arranged for it to be published. In a text of the speech reported by the Daily Telegraph, Boothroyd wrote: “Successive prime ministers have attached importance to their power of patronage; in my view this should be exercised far less generously than has tended to be the case in the recent past.
“Of course, prime ministers should be permitted to make appointments on leaving office, but they should be limited in their proposals and they should not include those who are simply friends or have no other qualifications than having fat bank accounts from which they have bankrolled the party in power.” The former Labour MP also wrote she did not “see a role any longer for members who are here simply as a result of their heredity”, calling the size of the Lords, with more than 800 members, “absurd”. “Not only do we not need so many members to carry out our role, but our size positively militates against effectiveness and efficiency and is unnecessarily expensive,” she said. She also called for all appointments to the House of Lords to be subject to the agreement of the Appointments Commission. “The commission’s powers should not simply be advisory, but should be put on a statutory basis,” she wrote. “Nobody should become a member of this House if a statutory Appointments Commission has reservations about their suitability.” The existence of Boothroyd’s final speech was made known at her memorial at Westminster Abbey earlier this month. According to Bevan, the final version, published on Monday in the House magazine, was agreed in 2022, a few months before her death at the age of 93. Boothroyd became the 27th woman elected to parliament when she won the seat of West Bromwich in May 1973, and went on to become the first female speaker of the House. Reflecting on her time in politics, she wrote: “My Lords, parliamentary politics for me has never been just a career; it has been my life and, like miners’ coal dust, it cannot be scrubbed out from under one’s fingernails.”