Godfrey John Bewicke-Copley, the seventh Baron Cromwell, traces his household’s title again to 1375. His forebears fought the French on the Battle of Agincourt. For the final decade, Lord Cromwell’s day job has been in Britain’s House of Lords, the place he mulls laws, runs to committee conferences and briskly greets fellow lawmakers in Parliament, lots of whom are elected.
His proper to be there may be rooted in his ancestry: Hereditary friends inherit their seats, in his case from his father, the sixth Baron Cromwell. But Lord Cromwell insists that his aristocratic lineage has little bearing on his work as a public servant within the halls of Westminster.
“We are usually not the port-swilling, fox-hunting hoorays on huge Downton Abbey-esque estates of well-liked creativeness,” he mentioned. “Indeed, generally individuals are quite dissatisfied after they discover that we’re sometimes hard-working professionals of 1 type or one other.”
For Lord Cromwell, that features a profession in personal banking, advising corporations on doing enterprise in Russia — one thing he now not does — and operating the household farm in Leicestershire. Gregarious, well-informed and opinionated, Lord Cromwell, 64, has spoken up frequently in debates on points from Ukraine to water high quality.
None of that may spare him from being evicted when the Labour authorities enacts a regulation eliminating hereditary friends, probably by the center of subsequent 12 months. Labour argues that these friends are undemocratic, a relic as superannuated because the ermine robes they put on. Purging them is step one to reforming an historic establishment which, although it has little greater than a consultative position in lawmaking, has change into, by all accounts, bloated, hidebound and ethically dodgy.
Lord Cromwell, whose household identify is Bewicke-Copley, admits a contact sadly that he’s associated to neither of England’s most well-known Cromwells, Oliver and Thomas. Having first gained his seat in 1982 after his father’s demise in a using accident, he views the passage of the regulation with remorse but in addition stoic acceptance. He even manages a splash of mordant wit.
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