The charmed circle

It?s the time of year when the British media?s cash-for-coronets stories recall the sign on an undistinguished commercial block on Lower Circular Road. LORDS is a reminder of an institution that once prompted a cheeky British journalist to mock that the only non-white hereditary peer?s ?address, so distinguished a gentleman is he, is Lord Sinha Road, Calcutta.? One surprising memento is a small framed drawing of the original Sinha house in the Jatin Das Park metro station where uncaring crowds don?t spare it a glance. Another is the signature ?Sinha of Raipur? in my tattered childhood autograph book among Ikin, Dooland, Ramadhin and P. Majumdar, relics of a brief flirtation with cricket. Frank Worrell refused to sign, something that I did not allow him to forget when, years later, fate threw us together as students.

That Sinha was Aroon Kumar, the second baron. The worthies in the lists for New Year?s Honours are potential life peers who often pay through the nose for the privilege. Swraj Paul reportedly gave ?109,000 first, and then another ?200,000. Waheed Alli, the gay TV magnate and Labour peer, provided political propaganda worth ?100,000. Of course, Indians are in the game only because Brits already were. Tony Blair and his party may have mopped up nearly ?25 million from aspirants.

Other prime ministers also raked it in, with Lloyd George?s Liberal government becoming known as ?loyd George?s ?iberals. J. Maundy Gregory, the most notorious title tout, charged ?100,000 for a peerage, ?40,000 for a baronetcy (five Indians) and ?10,000 for a paltry knighthood. There is the tale of a shady octogenarian millionaire, Joseph Robinson, whom the prime minister wanted to ennoble but George V refused. Mistaking the purpose of the emissary Number Ten had sent to break the bad news, Robinson, who was waiting anxiously at the Savoy hotel, whipped out his chequebook and fountain pen, asking in anguished tones, ?How much more?? He had every right to be annoyed, given Lord Northcliffe?s comment, ?When I want a peerage, I shall buy it like an honest man.? Had he been a brewer, he would have bought what is mocked as a ?beerage?.

Blair has appointed 292 life peers since 1996 against 216 in Margaret Thatcher?s 11 years and John Major?s 171 in seven. One in 10 Blair peers is a donor, and the biggest are often additionally rewarded with jobs or contracts. Truly might Lord Megabucks of Nowhere declare, ?My vote cannot be bought but may be rented.?

For centuries, Britain enjoyed the distinction of the world?s only hereditary second chamber. But as John Stuart Mill noted, ?an aristocratic House is only powerful in an aristocratic state of society.? If the second chamber is to provide a centre of resistance to populist power, it should also be drawn from the democratic mainstream, but correcting deficiencies of the electoral process by recognizing men of specialized training and knowledge. In suggesting that such assets to statecraft might be ennobled for life, Mill forgot that politicians use patronage only to further their own interests. No wonder Harold Macmillan, whom Margaret Thatcher arm-twisted into accepting an earldom so that she could later elevate herself, grumbled that many peers were ?unspeakably middle class.? Just as cronyism defeats the purpose of nominations to the Rajya Sabha, the titles bazaar erodes the new House of Lords?s credibility.

Both institutions demonstrate that a sense of hierarchy animates even egalitarian souls. Ramsay Macdonald, Britain?s first Labour prime minister, was said never to smile except when talking to a peer?s elder son, while Nirad Chaudhuri tells us that when two undergraduates tried to help up Dr Jenkyns, Master of Balliol, who had slipped and fallen, he exclaimed, ?Stop, I see a Master of Arts coming down the street!?

Everyone loves a lord. Titles, like three addresses, inspire respect. The British police are grappling with the case of an IT consultant who called himself Christopher Edward, Earl of Buckingham. Calcutta society once went gaga over another imposter who flew in with wife, secretary and a couple of large dogs. Claiming to be a baronet and heir to a well-known industrial fortune, he sponged on ambitious hostesses, ran up bills and flew out as mysteriously as he had come.

But the Lords Ahmed and Alli, Bagri and Bhatia, Desai and Dholakia, Prasher, Uddin, a Sikh King and an Anglican Nazir-Ali are for real. Cooling their feet in the peers? anteroom are Chai Patel (no relation of Lord Patel, the obstetrician, or Lord Adam Patel, the community leader), a healthcare tycoon who gave Labour ?10,000, and Gulam Noon, whose ready cooked curries provided ?225,000. Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja may be content with passports for cash (?1 million to the Millennium Dome is all that?s known), but what about Lakshmi Mittal?s ?2 million? He may demand more than Blair?s recommendation to the Romanians to sell him the steel mill he yearned for.

No longer dare English backwoods peers mock a Lord Chitnis as Lord Chutney. Too many Asian millionaires make fortunes from food, and buy any honour that?s going. Satyendra Prasanna Sinha (jata dharma stata jaya) would have been horrified. But gone is the time when a crusty Bombay baronet, suddenly waking up at a fashionable European party where the guests were into Hinduism, interrupted the aristocratic chatter about ?Lord Siva? and ?Lord Vishnu?, with, ?The only Indian lord is Lord Sinha!?

The fate of the house he built is in keeping with the times.