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Originally Posted by daveeb
I don't think this shower are particularly bothered about constitutional precedent or pesky legal technicalities anyhow, if needs must etc just do it.
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Call-me-Dave’s elevation to the Lords and appointment as Foreign Secretary made him the first peer to hold one of the 4 great offices of state since Lord Carrington resigned as Foreign Secretary in 1982 for failing to take seriously the signs that Argentina was planning to invade the Falklands.
The convention that senior ministers should be members of the commons so they could be regularly questioned by elected MPs itself goes much further back. The last Lord Prime Minister retired from office in 1902. Alex Douglas-Home was a peer when asked to become PM in 1962 but by then it was understood that it just wouldn’t do for him to remain in the Lords and he immediately renounced his peerage.
Personally I think more than 40 years of there being no Lords in any of the senior cabinet posts should have been enough to end the idea for good and it therefore smacked of desperation to parachute Cameron in. An admission there was nobody good enough in the entire elected Tory party. Some of the recent commentary around Sunak and the D-Day debacle leads me to think on some level he wanted a former PM to be Foreign Sec because that way he could turf a lot of the foreign policy that was rightfully the PM’s onto him. It has become clear that Sunak finds international relations boring. Poor wee scrap.