It sounds like Alice in Wonderland, with 750 unelected toffs substituting for the Queen of Hearts. Except it’s not a fairy story and it’s not funny. It’s the continuing saga of the House of Lords and the government’s snail-like progress towards reform.The hereditary peers of the second chamber were asking for trouble from day one, inflicting 38 defeats on New Labour during its first year in office alone. The peers were able to throw out legislation drafted by elected representatives of the people, not because they were pre-eminent lawmakers. They didn’t all have high IQs or pretty blue eyes, either.

They were not even a representative cross-section of the community, 750 men and women good and true. In fact, they were entirely unrepresentative, not least because 84% of them were male (compared to 49% of the UK population as a whole) and 69% were over 61 years old (compared to just 21% of the population).

The hereditary peers were allowed to wield such huge influence on public affairs simply because they were descended from someone who, a long time ago, had impressed the incumbent monarch. They might have lent money or troops, perhaps, or turned a complaisant eye to a wife’s royal dalliance.

Something had to be done and, in November 1999, all but 92 of the 750 hereditary peers lost their right to sit and vote in the chamber. In 2007, the House of Commons further voted to explore the option of a wholly elected chamber, but as is the way of politicians nothing much has happened.

Until yesterday, when justice secretary Jack Straw said he wanted to ‘invigorate the public debate’ about exactly what sort of second chamber should serve the country in the future. ‘The current situation where a small remainder of hereditary peers retained their seats in the Lords was intended as an interim step, and now it is time to complete the process,’ he said.

Straw has now put forward proposals that will see members of the second chamber chosen by elections, serving long terms of office, but unable to stand for more than one term. Large constituencies would each elect a member, with elections taking place at the same time as general elections, but only a third of seats contested each time. How they will be elected, and under what system, remains a subject for debate.

Proposals for the final stage of reform, Straw said, will be brought forward as soon as parliamentary time allows after the summer recess. ‘The government remains committed to reform of the House of Lords into a substantially or wholly elected chamber.’

‘Off with their heads!’ thundered the Queen of Hearts. But let’s not go quite that far. Suffice it to say, these proposals could signal the constitutional end, at last, for what has been dubbed the most exclusive gentlemen’s club in London – with its free parking, subsidised bars and dining rooms, and lots of quite splendid chaps from school, including no fewer than 26 bishops.