IN all this fuss about loans for peerages, there's one thing I can't understand. Why should anyone want to be made a peer?

Is it because they want to be called Lord (or Lady) so-and-so? Do they like the idea of being addressed like characters in a Shakespeare play? Do they think it makes them sound important?

Or do they feel an urgent desire to serve the country in some way and think they can best do it in the House of Lords?

And if that's the case, what does it say about us as a nation that our second legislative body requires its members to don fancy robes and old-fashioned titles?

I really don't understand why it's taken so long to reform the House of Lords. Properly reform it, I mean. It's been talked about - even promised - since around the First World War, and still no-one's done any more than tinker with it.

As for the fuss about people 'buying' peerages, isn't that precisely what many of the ancestors of our remaining hereditary peers did? During several periods of our history, peerages were openly for sale - it was a good way for cash-strapped monarchs (or prime ministers) to fill their coffers.

And when peerages weren't nakedly sold, there were often even more dubious qualifications for getting them. 'Service' to a monarch included all kinds of dodgy actitvities: murder and sexual favours among them.

It's not very savoury is it? Isn't it time we grew up and had an elected second chamber, or at the very least one selected not because its members had given money or services to a political party or were cronies of government ministers, but on merit alone? Let's leave titles as an historic relic to be used (or not) by those who were born with one, an amusing frill but no more. That wouldn't mean people with titles couldn't serve their country in any way they were able. They could even take their seats in a second chamber - but only, like everyone else, because they had something to offer. The title would have nothing whatsoever to do with the job.

Admittedly, no system of government, however democratic, is perfect. And there have been times when the House of Lords has actually defended our rights against the government of the day. But that doesn't mean it couldn't do so if all its members sat, not by right, but by the choice of the nation. Might they not even do it better?

So, if the Government is at last going to get round to completing its reform of the Lords, I hope it does it thoroughly this time. Let's stop calling it the House of Lords, stop giving titles to all who sit in it (or anyone else), and elect its members, preferably by some system of proportional representation, so that individual qualities and not party allegiance are the things that qualify its members to take their seats.

Tony Blair said he wished he'd been more radical in the reforms he'd brought about. Well, here's his best chance ever to show how great a reformer he can be. He might even find in years to come, when his premiership is long behind him, that he's remembered, gratefully, for something other than the disaster of Iraq.

Published: 30/03/2006