Archer and Black to be ousted from Lords | Lords for hire | Exclusive: Peers for cash investigation - new undercover footage | New secret audio recording | The scoop: how we broke the story | Insight: price for a peer to fix the law | Comment: Lords not so noble anymore | Red Box: the politics blog

The peers of the realm assembling for a crisis meeting last week were slack-girthed and stooped, with the sort of spidery red complexions that come from decades of good living. They cut exactly the sort of figures you would expect to find in the ageing upper chamber.

What a contrast to foxy Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, who swept in to read the riot act. Flame-haired, cool-eyed, with sexy long black boots, the Labour leader of the disgraced upper house looks more likely to crack a whip than pass the port.

Until last week, few outside the House of Lords had ever heard of her. For Royall has never been elected, and her rise from Neil Kinnock’s bag carrier in the 1990s to cabinet minister last year has gone almost unnoticed. Now she is in the eye of a storm — charged with lifting the House of Lords out of the mire following the Sunday Times story about peers’ apparent willingness to exert parliamentary influence in return for money.

Royall has risen to the occasion; even her enemies say she’s “having a good crisis”.

“There appear to be abuses, and clearly these abuses need to be rooted out,” she says. “Any wrongs there are, need to be righted. But it doesn’t mean to say that this house should be discredited. It shouldn’t be. It’s a very fine institution.”

Nevertheless, Royall, settling into an armchair in her rather grand office in the Lords, makes no attempt to downplay the import of the Sunday Times revelations: “I was deeply shocked, angry. There was no question that we would have to act and act fast.

“The House of Lords has got to put itself in order. Of course my cabinet colleagues, including the prime minister, are concerned. Like me, they are concerned about the impact this has had, not just on the Lords but on parliament, and on politics, and the reputation of politics in this country.

“We don’t have enough transparency in the House of Lords. I’m absolutely the first to admit that. And I think all my colleagues would agree. Transparency is very much a 21st-century concept.”

While great efforts have been made to drag Westminster into the Noughties, with breast-feeding areas, wi-fi, and a prime minister who uses Twitter to update voters on the minutiae of his day, the House of Lords today looks much as it did when Churchill was prime minister. The oak-panelled corridors, gentlemen’s bars and grand formal rooms overlooking the Thames owe nothing to the modern day.

In this clubby atmosphere, peers have grown used to anonymity. “Clearly we haven’t been scrutinised,” says Royall. “We haven’t been in the public eye as much as the House of Commons. The Lords is just a very different place.”

Is she saying that peers on the make just assumed they could get away with it? She gives a politician’s answer, saying she doesn’t think everybody “understood the rules”.

Can she enforce impartiality and honesty? She’s not an obvious candidate for command in a crisis. A former aide to Kinnock when he was a European Union commissioner in Brussels, she became a bureaucrat and boss of the European commission’s office for Wales in Cardiff. She fought for the Labour nomination in the Ogmore by-election in February 2002, only to lose in a bitter contest against a rival with bona fide Welsh roots.

According to Labour insiders, she had her fingers so badly burnt she never sought another safe seat. Instead, she was made a peer in 2004 and became leader of the house only last October.

She is, in fact, the type of peer now under threat. In 2007, the Commons voted for reforms to the Lords that would see either 100% of peers elected, or 80% with the remainder appointed. The Lords voted against any change. Under the plans, peers would receive salaries and could be booted out if they failed to turn up to work.

It seems likely peers would be less tempted to sell their services if they were properly paid.

“Ultimately, if there is an elected house, they will have to be salaried,” she says. “But I don’t think the fact that peers aren’t salaried means there should be problems.”

She rattles on again about the importance of a “proper system, rules, guidance, sanctions” being in place.

“I want to stress that this house, despite what people may think from the coverage in the past week, is a house full of people who in the vast majority of cases do a bloody good job,” she says.

“It’s a place where fantastic work goes on, it’s a place full of individuals of the highest integrity.” Up to a point. Whatever the police and various investigating committees conclude about the latest furore, two of Royall’s colleagues who have blatantly failed to maintain the highest standards are Lord Archer, jailed for perjury, and Lord Black, who was sentenced to 6½ years for fleecing his shareholders of millions of dollars. Extraordinarily, both are still members of the Lords, with the power to vote on new laws.

“Personally, I think it’s bananas,” splutters Royall. “Clearly, if someone’s been in prison, then, you know, they should not continue to be a peer of the realm.”

Times Recommends

• Margot Fonteyn: In her footsteps
• Forget beautiful people, let's have wonky Brits
• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power