Along with “people under the age of 18, aliens, prisoners, and persons of unsound minds”, members of the House of Lords will be denied a vote in June’s general election. Frank Longford, who once led the House but never saw politics as a career, used to quip that peers had much in common with “lunatics and convicts”.
Conversations with Frank were never dull. He was born in 1905, on the eve of the 1906 Liberal landslide, when the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, along with all bar three of his Conservative cabinet colleagues, lost their seats – catapulting Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George into Campbell-Bannerman’s government.
