Prime ministers have been increasingly careless with appointments to the Lords in recent decades, because since 1999 giving a man (or woman) a peerage no longer confers a right for their eldest son to inherit their seat in parliament. Now some are beginning to realize that if the old system of hereditary peerages still pertained, perhaps prime ministers would be far more careful about whom they put into the Lords - and the sovereign might be less reluctant to take issue with some names put forward for her approval. There was no damn'd merit in it - for centuries its members were from the elite establishment, great landowners, friends of the sovereign, and it has only been diluted slightly in the last century by admitting a few non-aristocratic prime ministers and other senior politicians. [Extracted from the article]
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