Guido’s graduate training programme continues to bear fruit. Yesterday evening the new peer Ross Kempsell gave his first speech in the House of Lords. He was not long ago a reporter with good grammar and a nose for a story. He went from Guido to become TalkRadio’s political editor, then to Downing Street for SpAdding, with a sojourn at The Times, before heading over to CCHQ to again set the country’s news agenda through Conservative Research Department. He was valued highly by Boris Johnson for his loyalty and sharp mind…

Kempsell last night gave a sharp critique of the government’s poor use of evidence in government spending decisions – “the lacuna that lies at the heart of government intervention itself.” Ross then touched on the “decades of hard work and aspiration” of his forebears and adapted John Major’s favourite quote for the Lords: “What did a passion for policy and debate do for a boy from Stevenage? It would lead him to serve in your Lordships’ house, and that is where I intend to contribute diligently with the benefit of guidance of noble Lords, on the questions before us today, and I hope many more to come.” Hear, hear…

As the Lords debates the Rwanda Bill in the Report Stage, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has done the inevitable and brought up the Nazis in reference to Rwanda. Welby clearly thought he’d struck gold political analysis when he said the Nazi government, “which had been been legally and properly elected, passed horrific laws that did terrible things starting from within a few weeks of the election of Adolf Hitler.” To Welby this proves the supremacy of international law over domestic law…

Welby went on to say: “the government is not doing something on the scale of what we saw at that stage”. Though it is in principle?

This is a clear example of Godwin’s Law entering the Lords: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Guido would like to say he did ‘Nazi’ that coming, though it is Welby…

The Rwanda Bill has entered the Report Stage in the Lords and will have amendments voted on tonight and on Wednesday. After a soft-touch interview with anti-Rwanda Lord Anderson, who argues that the bill will “pass into law a politically convenient fiction which has been exposed as such by the Supreme Court“, Mishal Husain took issue with Michael Howard’s explanation of Parliamentary Sovereignty. That is – the courts’ role is to review decisions, not to make them…

When Howard explained that “Parliament is fully entitled to put things right that it thinks the court has got wrong“, Husain’s deeply thought-out response was: “Can Parliament say black is white?“. Obviously, if Parliament passes any bill, it is then accountable to the electorate, unlike the Supreme Court, which it is clear “isn’t accountable to anyone“. It is always useful to re-establish the basics of parliamentary democracy…

When Boris Johnson’s peerage nominations were announced, there were months of negative media briefings and pearl-clutching Lobby exasperations over the whole list – particularly over the appointment of youngest peer, Charlotte Owen. As Guido said at the time, given that the average age of the Lords is 71, the appointment of some fresh faces hardly the biggest issue with the House of Lords (which no doubt needs reform)…

Last week, as is their occasional right, Plaid Cymru nominated 27-year-old Carmen Smith – also a former political staffer, with a basically identical CV to Johnson’s aides – to join the upper house for life. How did it go down with the righteous scribes of SW1?

Carmen was treated to a glowing write up in The Times, which subjected the lifelong lawmaker to scrutiny by noting she is ‘principled’ and ‘a good laugh’. It stands in contrast to The Times’ treatment of Johnson’s peers – the paper ran a number of stinking leaders railing against them, with the op-ed pages and Lobby team deployed to generate reams of outraged copy over every cough and spit of the process. The BBC decided to nose their piece on Tory donors instead. The Guardian, which twisted itself into paroxysms of apocalyptic outrage over Johnson’s nominations, has mentioned Carmen’s nomination in just one line of copy. Tortoise, which ran a highly personalised single issue campaign on the matter, has not even covered the development. This is all despite the fact that Plaid Cymru opposes the existence of the House of Lords and Carmen herself thinks it should be abolished. Guido has nothing against Carmen Smith – her age is not her fault. It simply proves for the lefty establishment media, it’s one rule about how to treat Boris, and another for everyone else…

Lord Cameron has kicked off his maiden speech with jokes aplenty as he speaks in the Lords for the second reading of the CPTPP Bill. The “infamous” shepherd’s hut got an early mention from Cameron. Thus killing the joke forever…

Cameron said he wasn’t waiting to come back to politics like a “latter-day De Gaulle… asked to take back control“, or a “Cincinnatus hovering above the crowd” and that he leaves “all classical allusions, and illusions for that matter, to another former prime minister“. It took a while to warm the crowd up, though they got there in the end…

Charlotte Owen, Boris’s former staffer and later Downing Street SpAd, has become the youngest life peer in British history at the age of 30. No doubt the chorus of voices celebrating Keir Mather’s election last week will be pleased to hear another young voice in parliament…