At last... those new peerages

Finally, after several false starts, the list of new life peerages has been announced. There are ten new Liberal Democrat peers. How does this list compare with Liberator’s predictions on 16th June?

Well, we correctly predicted that there would be ten new peers and we correctly predicted seven of them:

• Olly Grender
• Christine Humphreys
• Brian Paddick
• James Palumbo
• Alison Suttie
• Rumi Verjee
• Sir Ian Wrigglesworth

We also predicted an unnamed Scottish Liberal Democrat, who turned out to be:

• Jeremy Purvis

We failed to predict two:

• Cathy Bakewell
• Zahida Manzoor

Meanwhile, two of our predictions went away empty-handed:

• Liz Lynne
• Julie Smith

In any event, there is an equal number of men and women on the Liberal Democrat list. But the list is heavily biased to people resident in London (even if they came from somewhere else originally).

The practice of ennobling former MPs seems to have come to an end. Only one of the nominees is a former MP (Sir Ian Wrigglesworth), and he lost his seat in 1987. His nomination probably had more to do with his subsequent services to the party than his time as an MP.

How many of today’s new peers were elected to the party’s Interim Peers Panel? The answer is just two; Brian Paddick, who was elected to the panel in 2008 (and, strictly speaking, his membership of the panel expired in 2012), and Olly Grender, who was elected to the 2006 panel (which expired in 2010).

Only one person from the most recent list (elected in 2010) has so far been made a peer: Sal Brinton. Only three from the 2008 list have previously been ennobled: Jonathan Marks, Monroe Palmer and Ben Stoneham. It is probably safe to assume that Mr Clegg does not have much time for the Interim Peers Panel.