In the House of Lords they are still busy debating a bill that will decide whether 92 assorted dukes, earls, viscounts and hereditary barons should continue to have a role in making laws for the rest of us.
Talking of which, my eye was caught this week by a messy family saga involving the 8th Marquess of Ailesbury, who, along with 666 blue-blooded colleagues, was peremptorily booted out of the upper chamber in the great Tony Blair purge of aristos in 1999. Only 92 hereditaries were left standing.
The current row among the Ailesbury clan is over money. Theirs is a complicated family tree, since the late marquess, 98, (aka, Michael Burden-Bruce) had been married and divorced three times before settling down with an exotic former fashion model who once dated Frank Sinatra, Teresa Marshall de Paoli.
Ms Marshall de Paoli , 89, says members of the family have accused her of pushing her late husband, the marquess, out of the window—a claim she denies. But before we consider the subsequent unpleasantness over his estate, it is as well to retrace how the marquess inherited his title—and with it the honour of sitting in the House of Lords for 25 years.
Michael Brudenell-Bruce, or MB-B, as we will shorthand him, is descended from Lord Cardigan, who led the Light Brigade into a smog of doom (“someone had blundered”) in Crimea in 1854. The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith’s definitive account of the battle described the Earl of Cardigan as handsome and gallant, but arrogant, snobbish and short-tempered—an almost caricature nobleman.
The Cardigan title dates back to 1611, when the first Earl picked up the title for £1,000. The first Marquess of Ailesbury was a modestly active MP in the early 19th century. He was also, in the way of the aristocracy, the holder of several other offices: the 1st Viscount Savernake of Savernake Forest (dating back to the Battle of Hastings) and the 1st Earl Bruce of Whorlton in Yorkshire. MB-B, therefore, had the pick of three titles and, initially at least, preferred to be known as Viscount Savernake.
Are you keeping up?
So far as the Ailesbury title goes, we can skip to the 7th Marquess, who also married three times, and who moved out of England for tax purposes in the late 1960s. By now a stockbroker, MB-B inherited the top title in 1974, but didn’t make his maiden speech as a marquess until five years later.
In a 1979 House of Lords debate on “The English Language: Deterioration in Usage,” MB-B told of his anguish at a British Leyland car advertisement that contained a split infinitive. He spoke of writing to the BL boss, Lord Stokes, to complain. He went on to deplore the words “ongoing” and “upcoming”, before sitting down after nine minutes. Hansard records few contributions in his subsequent quarter of a century in the upper chamber.
And so to his death in May last year. The police were called to his home after TMdP claimed to have found her partner lying in a pool of blood while she was looking for their cat, Honeybun. PC Katherine Taylor told the inquest that her “main concern at that point was the cat.”
MB-B had two belts around his arms, apparently to prevent him from trying to break his fall. Whether the belts were attached by himself or another hand was a matter of conjecture, since Honeybun, the only potential witness, was saying nothing.
Another police officer, Sergeant Carla McCrae, said she found it “unusual” when TMdP told her MB-B “must have fallen out of the window trying to save the cat.” According to TMdP, MB-B had previously talked about assisted dying, but complained that “lefty nurses” stopped doctors from helping people to die.
In a striking hereditary echo through the ages, the coroner said that MB-B was probably aware of the circumstances of the death of his mother, the Countess of Cardigan, who fell from a seventh-floor window at the Savoy Hotel in 1937. She reportedly left a note describing her family as a “feckless and unstable lot”.
The coroner in the present case returned a verdict of suicide and then the family feud burst out into public view. It transpired that the 9th marquess, one David Brudenell-Brice, was estranged from his father. DB-B has been involved in a number of legal actions over family assets over the years. At one point he was reported to be claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance while training to be a lorry driver.
Sadly, DB-B’s own son, Thomas B-B (aka, Viscount Savernake) appears to have taken TMdP’s side of the rows that have been extensively chronicled by the Daily Mail. And he himself has been unsuccessfully fighting his sister, Bo Bruce (aka, Lady Catherine Anna Brudenell-Bruce), who was a runner-up on the 2012 TV series, The Voice, over a £2.4m house left to them by her mother, Lady Rosamond, former Countess of Cardigan.
Bo’s relationship with her father was a troubled one: she was arrested and cautioned for slashing the tyres of his silver Audi (“It was very therapeutic”). Space does not allow me to do full justice to the legal blood-letting over the years. Bo described her family to the Times as “eccentric and painfully dysfunctional”.
This is Shakespeare with a touch of Coronation Street. It is EastEnders as scripted by PG Wodehouse. Neighbours with a flick of Julian Fellowes.
The saga of the Ailesburys may be an unedifying one, but such family feuds and miseries are commonplace throughout society. The aristocracy are, arguably, no worse than the rest of us, but nor are they better than those of us without titles, hand-me-down wealth, ancient forestry or crumbling mansions.
The mystery is why the hereditary principle took such a hold on us for so long. Blair only managed to get most of the aristocracy out of the House of Lords in 1999 by accepting a compromise, whereby 92 of them remained—with periodic byelections when one falls off the perch.
Not even Wodehouse could do justice to these plebiscites. In the most recent by-election, following the death of Lord Brougham and Vaux, there were 259 votes and 14 candidates. The winner, with 133 votes, was the 8th Baron Camoys. It makes the recent conclave in the Sistine Chapel look positively futuristic.
Lord Camoys, an Eton-educated Conservative, is there because of someone called Ralph de Camoys (d. 1336), who was a favourite of Edward II. So, who better to call the shots for British citizens today?
And yet, we are still arguing about the latest proposal to dump the aristocracy from any role in making laws for the rest of us. Endless justifications are still being trundled out by peevish peers: hereditariness brings continuity and experience; geographical and social diversity (yes, really!); pragmatic stability; a public-minded sense of duty. And so on.
The bill is currently at the report stage and, notwithstanding these persuasive debating points, will almost certainly pass. And that will be the end of the road for the 8th Baron Camoys and his colleagues, along with the hereditary principle in British public life.
Apart, obviously, from the monarchy.
