Johnson Sparks Cronyism Row with Appointments to House of Lords

(Bloomberg) -- Boris Johnson’s appointment of 19 new Conservative members of the House of Lords sparked a row over cronyism and a complaint from the speaker of the upper house about its increasingly bloated membership.

The U.K. prime minister’s nominations include nine former Conservative members of parliament -- among them his brother Jo Johnson and former Brexit rebels Ken Clarke and Philip Hammond -- as well as former party treasurer Michael Spencer. Including Labour and non-affiliated peers, the list swells to 36.

Two years ago, Prime Minister Theresa May promised to limit the number of new appointments to the unelected second chamber following a report by the Lord Speaker’s committee recommending its membership be reduced to 600. Johnson’s appointments brings the figure to about 830, almost 200 more than the elected House of Commons.

“That is a massive policy u-turn,” Lord Speaker Norman Fowler said in an e-mailed statement. “The big opportunity was for the present government to take forward this movement for reform.”

Other appointments include Helena Morrissey, the former chief executive officer of Newton Investment Management, and Minouche Shafik, director of the London School of Economics. The two had been considered as candidates to become governor of the Bank of England last year. The position eventually went to Andrew Bailey.

Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the London Evening Standard, will sit as a crossbencher, while Charles Moore, Johnson’s former editor at the Daily Telegraph newspaper and biographer of Margaret Thatcher, will sit as a non-affiliated peer, meaning he isn’t attached to any political party.

Also joining the Lords are Veronica Wadley, a former Telegraph colleague and adviser to Johnson when he was Mayor of London, and Edward Lister, his chief strategic adviser.

“By giving a large number of his cronies peerages, he has shown that the Tories have abandoned any pretense of reducing the size of the bloated House of Lords,” said Dick Newby, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats in the upper chamber.

One figure was notably absent from the list of nominations: John Bercow, the former speaker of the House of Commons, who infuriated Brexiteers during debates over leaving the European Union. Typically, former holders of that post are immediately elevated to the Lords.

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