At the start of a new Parliament we get the announcement today that the already bloated House of Lords is to get a fresh infusion of over 50 new patronage peers.

Some of these are “working peers” – whatever that means.

During the Public Administration Select Committee’s one-off inquiry into the Lord Ashcroft affair on 18 March, I asked Sir Hayden Phillips, the mandarin and former gatekeeper to the House of Lords, to give me a definition of a working peer.

He refused even to have a stab at it. The term is completely phoney.

The Lib Dem peer, Tony Greaves, was ennobled in 2000. He told the Lancashire Telegraph earlier this year: “Ashcroft was made a peer on the same list of “working peers” as I was. Since then, he has made an average of one speech every two years, never asked an oral question, never tabled an amendment to a Bill, and voted in about 16 per cent of divisions.”

Anyway… The list is very dispiriting. It looks too much like business as usual.

Why was there no constitutional innovation? We have already had one - the new 55% rule. Why no fixed term peerages?

One Parliament surely would be enough while the unfinished business of Lords reform is finally steered through.

The previous Labour Government squandered years when we could have ended this affront – one half of the nation’s Parliament the product of grace and favours.

We need a small directly elected Upper Chamber. Not a House of Patronage stuffed full of cronies.

The sight of another huge influx of peers-for-life taking their seats on the red leather benches makes me gag.

See the Downing Street notice of the new peers.