At the risk of getting my backside blasted with a twelve-bore, I feel like falling to my knees at the gates of my local nob's house and saying sorry.

I was one of those who cheered on Tony Blair when he embarked on his mission to rid the House of Lords of hereditary peers. I began to feel mutinous when, in a fit of pique, the peers threatened to block all legislation then passing through the Upper House. How dare these old buffoons, who are only in Parliament because some distant ancestor slept with Edward II, try to throw their weight around in a democracy, I thought. I felt like raising a mob to pull them from their country piles and toss them into their lakes.

I now realise, though, that they were staunch upholders of civility and decency compared with the mercenary toadies that have replaced them. Somehow I can't imagine the late Duke of Devonshire trying to squeeze £120,000 out of a lobbyist to help to gain an exception on business rates - not even if the roof at Chatsworth had fallen in and he had worn through the leather patches on his elbows.

I don't care that the four Labour peers caught out by undercover reporters from The Sunday Times didn't actually receive any money: the thought that a British peer could even contemplate taking money to advance a particular cause chills me. Coming in the week that Barack Obama passed a rule forbidding any of his staff from engaging in lobbying activities for several years after leaving his employment, it is a reminder of how far Labour's moral integrity has decayed.

Maybe there is something, after all, to be said for an upper parliamentary chamber made up entirely of hereditary peers, whose hands are unsullied by trade and who - in some cases, at least - have had a notion of public duty drummed into them from an early age.

But better still, may this scandal hasten the day when the House of Lords becomes a fully elected chamber. The appalling thing about the current House of Lords is that it has become a receptacle for all manner of wannabe politicians who would fail if they put themselves up before the electorate: MPs who have lost their seats, party donors with little popular appeal, and retired, often disgraced, Cabinet ministers who use the place like a free gentlemen's club.

Until we, the people, have the sole right to determine who sits in the Lords I am going to feel like dragging members from their red benches. We remain a country under the thumb of an aristocracy - albeit one that now speaks less poshly, lives in less tasteful houses and sells tickets to its salons to the highest bidder.

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