Labour peer Lord Christopher

4 min read03 October

You are the oldest peer? “So they tell me,” replies 100-year-old Anthony Martin Grosvenor Christopher. He speaks to The House as the only living centenarian in Parliament and the last British parliamentarian to have served in the Second World War.

Lord Christopher began a four-year service in the Royal Air Force in 1944. Asked for wartime memories, he replies simply: “Mainly the good food in Canada. The rations here were pretty tight. Doing night flying there, we’d come back and see piles of stuff.” That must have been an amazing sight? “It was.”

Christopher is visiting Parliament at a time when the world is gripped by multiple crises, from the unrelenting war in Ukraine to devastating conflict across the Middle East, with all events shaped by a volatile administration in the US.

“What strikes me about the world now is the dearth of really able leaders. When you look back and see George Washington…” the Labour peer says, tacitly drawing a comparison to Donald Trump. “We don’t, these days, find it very easy to find real leadership.”

He indicates that he is not happy domestically either, adding: “Where are the big leaders? In Britain too.” And yet his own party has only just regained power after 14 years in the wilderness.

“It’s facing some pretty weird opposition. People I don’t find much to admire in at all – I won’t name anybody.”

Asked, then, about the rise of Reform UK, the peer remarks: “I don’t think Parliament is helped a lot by having a number of small parties. If I grew up in a small party, I’d want to make my name known somehow, and that’s not always easy when you might broadly agree with either a Conservative approach or a Labour approach.”

Christopher will not be drawn specifically on how Keir Starmer compares to his predecessors, but the implication is clear when he suggests in response that more talent could be attracted to our political class.

“My own view has long been that we don’t pay Members of Parliament enough,” he says. To campaign for better pay is in the nature of this former tax official and trade unionist. Christopher worked at the Inland Revenue in the 1950s, and later headed up the tax clerks’ IRFS union. When created a life peer in 1998, he was chairman of the TU Fund Managers, a company established by the trade union movement to direct its investments to companies with union recognition.

All MPs currently receive a basic annual salary of £93,904, which compares very favourably to the average UK salary of around £35,000 but poorly to the high-paying professions some MPs point out they could otherwise be engaged in.

“Personally, I’d structure it differently – when you consider what Americans pay, and some Commonwealth countries pay,” the peer says. (MP salaries are lower in France and Spain, for example, but indeed higher in Australia and the US.)

Labour has backed away so far from radically reforming the House of Lords in its first term. Instead, the party is removing the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote, and – while not implemented so far – Labour’s manifesto backs the introduction of mandatory retirement for all peers at 80. Along with the 92-year-old Lord Dubs and others, Christopher would have to bow out permanently.

He makes clear he has “never been in favour of an elected Lords”, saying: “That would change the Lords very considerably, I’m not sure for the better. You really don’t want a House of Lords which could noticeably compete with the Commons.”

As for his own future in Parliament, the peer has neither spoken in the Upper Chamber nor voted since 2019, and has so far declined to take an oath to King Charles – a requirement for active peers.

Now 100 years old and based in Woldingham, Surrey, nobody can blame him for finding the journey into London unappealing. To the surprise of The House, however, Christopher says his participation could still change – he might take the oath any day now.

“I’ve thought about it and I might do. I still might do.”