The adjective “historic” is bandied about far too often in politics, covering all sorts of things that are unlikely to detain historians of the future. Football matches and TV shows are routinely described as historic when they simply are not. The other day I even saw a hamburger described as historic.

Today, however, the debate about the abolition of the hereditary element in the House of Lords after its 800 years of service is indeed historic and will be studied by historians in years to come. We should conduct ourselves, therefore, in a way that, as Andrew Marvell wrote of Charles I at his execution, future historians will say that we “nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene”.

Yet it strikes me that His Majesty’s Government is indeed about to do something very mean-spirited in including the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain in this legislation to remove the remaining hereditary Peers from the House of Lords.

These two noble Lords undertake totally different roles on behalf of the Crown and state from any other of the hereditary Peers, roles that greatly benefit from their being Members of this House. Excising these two hereditary Peers from the Bill would be an easy and costless way both to show gratitude to them for their hard work in unpaid roles — the quintessence of noblesse oblige — but also, crucially, to allow them to stay in close touch with the House whom they serve so efficiently.

We all know the history. The office of Lord Great Chamberlain dates back to the Norman Conquest, when William the Conqueror appointed Robert Malet to superintend the improvements of Westminster Palace. He did it on time and under budget, as I am sure will also be the case in the current restoration and renewal project. The office was made hereditary by Henry I in 1133, which is more than three-quarters of a century before the barons — statues of whom we see above us here — forced King John to sign Magna Carta.

For some reason, Lords Great Chamberlain had the right in law to demand the clothes worn by the monarch at his or her Coronation. However, James I had just arrived from chilly Edinburgh and did not want to part with them, so he paid £200 in lieu. Similarly, Queen Anne paid £300 to keep her “bottom drawer intact”.

The Earl Marshal organises occasions such as state funerals, the State Opening of Parliament and Coronations. This office was founded in 1135. Although Richard III appointed the Duke of Norfolk to it in 1483, it became hereditary to the Norfolk family only in 1672. According to Robert Hardman’s biography of King Charles III, when the present Duke of Norfolk asked his father, Miles, about the complexities of organising Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, he replied: “Look, I organised the Guards’ crossing of the Rhine in 24 hours in wartime. I can organise a funeral”. It was he who code-named the funeral Operation London Bridge, but, in the event, the organisation of the funeral fell to his son, the present noble Duke, which he undertook superbly.

The ability of this country to put on state ceremonials of fine and undeniable pomp and circumstance is one of the key aspects of the soft power about which we hear so much. Over four billion people around the world watched the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II; this is estimated to be more than half the world’s population, and it was the most-watched broadcast event in history, surpassing the 1996 Atlanta Olympics opening ceremony. Over two billion people in 125 countries watched the Coronation of the present King. These are tremendous opportunities to show our country at its best. The two Peers mentioned in this amendment are epicentral to them. We should be trying to make their jobs easier, rather than harder by excluding them from this House.

Walter Bagehot famously differentiated between the “efficient” and the “dignified” parts of the British constitution, with the Commons highlighted as the efficient part, however unlikely that might sound today, and the monarchy being the dignified part. The point about the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain is that they are both dignified and efficient. To spare them from the exigencies of the Bill should be done on the grounds that membership of this House would allow them to maintain more easily the contacts that help them perform their duties.

The Lord Great Chamberlain will also be intimately involved in the restoration and renewal project, because of his responsibility for the fabric of the Royal Gallery and the Robing Room, which would be much easier for him to undertake were he still a Member of this House rather than an outsider. The three people who run Westminster Hall are the Lord Speaker, the Speaker of the House of Commons and him. Nothing happens there without all three agreeing, yet he would be the only one who is not a Member of either House of Parliament.

As a country, we seemingly can no longer build high-speed rail links, conduct public inquiries for less than £200 million or open Hammersmith Bridge to cars in less than half a decade. The current Westminster restoration and renewal project is presently slated to take longer than the Victorians took to actually build the Palace after the great fire of 1834.

We are all familiar with the exciting daily saga of our front door, which is ever evolving and rarely revolving. In a sense, the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain are the exact opposite of all that: they work well, cheaply and efficiently. Yet we are about to penalise and hamper the two architects of our state ceremonial. It is as though we were looking for the one area of British public life that still works faultlessly and deliberately trying to sabotage it.

What if, God forbid, anything went wrong in a state ceremony, and there was criticism of the Earl Marshal or the Lord Great Chamberlain in this Chamber? They would not be able to speak up in their own defence if they were not Members of this House, which is surely an offence against natural justice. These two public servants are entirely unpaid. In his 1944 book Quality or Equality?, Christopher Hollis wrote of noblesse oblige: “Where people are willing — as they often are — to serve their fellow men without hope of monetary reward, let us thankfully take advantage of their readiness”.

Yet, instead of taking advantage of this, we seem to be exiling them from the House. The egalitarianism that is a such a motivating part of the Government’s creed, for better or for worse, has surely reached its most ludicrous stage when it forces the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain to queue up in the Pass Office to get a visitor’s lanyard for admittance to the House. Even the most egalitarian tricoteur must recognise that there is something wrong about us treating so ungratefully two noble men, whose sole crime is to have agreed to their sovereign’s request to serve their country in the way their ancestors have for generations. In Westminster, where every brick exudes history, are we really going to expel the holders of two of the great offices of state that derive from the 12th century?

Even the tribunals of the French Revolution spared 2% of the aristocrats who were dragged in front of them for mob justice, allowing that paltry percentage to escape the sanguine strictures of Madame Guillotine. We have found our 2%, in the persons of the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain. Yet on present showing, the Government are, in percentage terms, if clearly not in the nature of the punishment, going to be even more inflexible and ideological than the Jacobins.

Membership of the House of Lords for the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain costs the Government nothing whatever, yet it is a way of thanking them and their families for centuries of loyal, efficient and invaluable service to the state. Indeed, to strip them of it is, frankly, an act of rank ingratitude, and I hope the Government will think again.

This is an edited version of a speech given to the House of Lords on 1 July.

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Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, is a historian and Member of the House of Lords.

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