No longer is it the chamber to which prime ministers can report or an Upper House that can indefinitely thwart the nation's elected representatives. More than half its former members have been disenfranchised, and those now sitting on the red leather benches do so only until Labour's stuttering reforms clarify their status and their powers. But the House of Lords still plays a large and contentious role in legislative debate and revision. And it is still a remarkable convenience for prime ministers wishing to bring chums, gurus and boffins into government swiftly.

The handy device is the life peerage, an alternative to the hereditary principle pioneered by Robert Boothby, adopted by Lord Home after a brief prime ministerial spell as a commoner and now, overwhelmingly, the basis of the modern peerage. And a life peerage, complete with sobriquet, ermine and social cachet, is now conferred regularly on outsiders who have scarcely earned ennoblement through a lifetime of service but whose immediate services are needed. Peter Mandelson joins Digby Jones and Stephen Carter among Gordon Brown's new peers. But Lord Jones left the Government after only 14 anaemic months. Will the newly ennobled Lord Carter also prove to be peer today and gone tomorrow?

But though their ministerial services may be short-lived, their titles remain for life. Was this a motivation for taking the job? The charge is demeaning, but a suspicious public might think so, given the murky cash-for-honours affair. What is needed is a change as revolutionary as Lord Stansgate's metamorphosis as Tony Benn. Let political appointees accept a peerage while in office; and set it aside when the job is done.