We want to finish the job Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George left us, and remove the last 92 hereditaries as part of making the Lords more representative and democratic. First, on proportional representation (PR) for the Commons, and now on Lords reform, where he suddenly declared a “hybrid House” unacceptable in principle, although he saw no problem in his own 2001 election manifesto backing Lord Wakeham’s proposal for a 20 per cent elected element in the Lords.We are most likely to win constitutional reform from this Government when it is either very strong or pretty weak. On Monday the massed ranks of Conservative and cross-bench peers, with a very rare sighting of the golden-plumed Lord Heseltine, voted to block a supreme court.
If Labour could not persuade enough of its peers to turn out to get that Bill over its first hurdle, even with solid Liberal Democrat backing, its wider Lords Reform Bill must be dead on the drawing board.Whatever the whinges about lack of consultation or where the new supreme court will sit, all real reformers must support the separation of judges from legislators and the long-overdue abolition of the deeply undemocratic office of Lord Chancellor – conflict of interest personified. We will do what we can to help the Government get this show back on the road.But Liberal Democrats in both Houses of Parliament remain deeply sceptical about the Government’s highly hyped, silkily spun but still invisible Bill to replace the hereditaries with an all-appointed House of Lords.Tony Blair has kicked us twice into the long grass. The wariness, if not hostility, they will encounter in their home communities, plus the two years they have spent in Camp Delta, are punishment enough.. How and why they came to be in a third country where they were picked up by US forces on suspicion of involvement in terrorism is something that has implications for our own national security and for international security generally. If, once they have been questioned, the police judge that there is no charge to answer, they should be released.

It has also exposed the hollowness of the “special relationship”. When the United States invokes national security, no appeal to any special relationship or to otherwise universally accepted definitions of rights cuts any ice. Britain is in exactly the same position as other countries: the only weapon it has is the capacity to make life difficult for the US internationally by making public the argument – something ministers and diplomats are reluctant to do.The Government will certainly hail the return of the five detainees as a useful start – which it is fully entitled to do It is also a welcome solace for the families concerned. But little has been solved and a whole new set of dilemmas is only beginning.The five individuals not now considered an international danger by the United States will find themselves embroiled in a political controversy for which they are ill-prepared and a criminal justice system ill-equipped to deal with their very particular circumstances.

Whatever crime they may have committed has been committed far from home in conditions of civil war and foreign intervention that the law of this country hardly envisaged. There must be considerable doubt whether they have any case to answer in Britain at all.So far, the police and most of the lawyers have been suitably reticent There is good reason why the men should be questioned. It has had to listen to the US invoking the danger of war and promising to abide selectively with parts of the Geneva conventions, while not recognising its detainees as prisoners of war.The whole episode has demonstrated the hopeless disparity in power between our two countries. and always used this translucent face with delicate and exciting talent”. A winsome brunette, whose suitors included the writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz, she was married for 57 years to one of her leading men, Joel McCrea.The daughter of a civil engineer, she was born Jean Dee in Los Angeles, all reference books say in 1907, though her family aver it was 1909; and was educated at the University of Chicago, where her success in college plays prompted her to journey to Hollywood in the hope that the new sound era had created a need for performers who could handle dialogue: When I dropped out to go to Hollywood, my father gave me an ultimatum. He told me that I had a year to find something more reliable in the picture business than extra work or else I had to come back.As a contract player at Paramount, she was an extra in such films as Words and Music (1929), Follow Thru (1930), Manslaughter (1930) and Monte Carlo (1930). Then “almost a year to the day after my father’s ultimatum” she was spotted in the studio commissary by Maurice Chevalier.