‘We have to go’: longest-serving lord reflects on looming Labour eviction
At the age of 84, David Trefgarne is not the oldest active peer in the House of Lords.But now well into his 64th year in the upper house, he is very much the longest serving.And in the next few months, it will all end.The 2nd Baron Trefgarne, to use his formal title, is one of the few hereditary peers still helping to make UK law, the tail end of a legislative chain dating back to the 13th century and Magna Carta.When one of these laws, the House of Lords (hereditary peers) bill, receives royal assent some time in the spring, that will be that.
“I’m very sorry, obviously,” said Trefgarne,“I was coming to the end of my time in the house, anyway,I have been there a long time,I go as often as I can,But I think it was inevitable eventually, and therefore I’m fairly relaxed about it.
”When Trefgarne entered the Lords in June 1962, life peerages had been in existence for only five years, meaning the bulk of the upper house was still based around fellow hereditary lawmakers,Reforms under Tony Blair’s government slashed the number of hereditary peers to 92, a remaining rump selected by votes within the Lords,Trefgarne was among those selected by his fellow Conservatives, and thus remained,“As I understand it, the bill will become an act some time in April, and that will be when we have to go,” said Trefgarne,“I’m getting on a bit, so I was probably going to retire before too long anyway.
So there we are.”The departure of the hereditary peers will, nonetheless, be a constitutionally significant moment, he says: “It’s the end of more than an era.It was King John we started with.His late majesty.”Unlike some of the ancient peerages, Trefgarne’s title dates back only to 1947 when his father, the Liberal and subsequently Labour MP George Garro-Jones, was made a baron, in a time when creating hereditary titles was still common.
Trefgarne was only 19 and a student at Princeton University in the US when his father died, taking up his place in the Lords as soon as he turned 21.He admits to a slow start as a lawmaker, “as I was busy earning a living”.This living involved a series of jobs, including a five-month period in 1963 when Trefgarne and a friend flew a single-engined light plane from England to Australia to deliver it to a flying club, making the return trip in a 1930s biplane.He later worked as a commercial pilot.But by his late 30s, Trefgarne was a whip for Margaret Thatcher, and spent a decade holding a series of ministerial jobs in her governments.
As a junior Foreign Office minister in 1982, it was Trefgarne’s job to set out the government’s position in a crucial debate shortly before the Falklands war.“We were debating what to do, as was the House of Commons,” Trefgarne recalls.“Peter Carington was the foreign secretary, and he would have wound up the debate but he wanted to speak to the 1922 Committee [of Conservative backbench MPs], and so I was left to wind up the debate in the House of Lords.”Trefgarne speaks warmly of Carington, who resigned soon after, saying he had to take responsibility for his department’s failure to predict the Argentinian invasion.“We all attempted to persuade him otherwise, including Margaret Thatcher,” Trefgarne said.
“But I’m afraid we failed,He kept saying: ‘My honour demands nothing less,’ He wouldn’t even discuss it,He was, I think, the best foreign secretary since the war,”Trefgarne is similarly complimentary about Thatcher, and also has praise for some subsequent Conservative prime ministers, including David Cameron: “I talk a lot to David Cameron.
He comes to the house quite a bit, and I find myself sitting next to him half the time – and Theresa May.”He is less keen on others, in an understated way: “I’m not a great Boris fan.What do I think of Liz Truss? Not a lot, to be honest.”While he has not been a minister for 35 years, Trefgarne remained highly active in the Lords, serving on committees until 2022.He still regularly votes and speaks, although he is slightly less active after what he calls, quietly, “a difficult year” following the death of his wife.
And now full retirement approaches,Trefgarne has not always accepted his fate quietly,In 2016 he helped talk out a bill which would have abolished the system of internal Lords byelections to replace hereditary peers who retire or die, which would have seen them gradually disappear,He is not, however, among those trying to block change now,“That was right at the time – it was a number of years ago,” he says of his tactics in 2016.
“But we are now in a position where the Labour party put their thoughts on the House of Lords in their manifesto, and they were elected with a large majority.So a change of some kind was inevitable.”Will he miss the chamber in which he has spent so much of his life? “Yes.But one’s got to live in the real world.”
Facebook slow to act on posts celebrating Bondi beach massacre, anti-hate group says
Facebook hosted terrorist propaganda that celebrated the murder of Jews and praised Islamic State, a leading anti-hate group has alleged.The posts included celebrations of the Bondi beach massacre that the Community Security Trust says Facebook has been too slow to take down. The posts were still on Facebook on 16 December, two days after the attack, and received shares and likes.Some accounts are Britain-based and those have been reported to counter-terrorism police in the UK as a matter of urgency.One post shows video of the aftermath of the Bondi beach attack, which was allegedly carried out by a father and son who were IS supporters, and says: “Allah is the greatest and praise to Allah
We must take control of AI now, before it’s too late | Letters
“When the AI bubble bursts, humans will finally have their chance to take back control”, says the headline on Rafael Behr’s article (23 December). I think it’s more likely that when the AI bubble bursts, the creators of the crisis, along with other wealthy economic actors, will be in the rooms with the politicians telling them how to “rescue” us all by transferring wealth in some way from average citizens to the already extremely wealthy. Just like they did during the financial crisis of 2008.We need to be ready with alternative plans. For example, world governments could coordinate to buy, for suitably low prices, majority shares in any crashing tech company that actually produces something useful, ensuring that those shares come with full voting rights
When swiping up doesn’t get you far | Letters
Speaking of odd habits as a result of using technology (Letters, 25 December), I once passed a bus shelter where a mother was waiting with her young child. The shelter had a huge poster of a new mobile phone and the toddler was leaning out of its buggy and desperately swiping the screen of the phone, presumably in the hope of getting cartoons.Ron BaileyNewcastle upon Tyne I read Joanna Rimmer’s letter on this subject and tried to “like” it.Heather BradfordWinchester Which tablet/ebook user hasn’t absentmindedly put their finger on a printed word they don’t know expecting to see the dictionary definition pop up?Tim MartineauWirral, Merseyside I don’t understand why, when reading a physical copy of the Guardian, the page doesn’t scroll when I swipe up. Can this be corrected, please?Geoff Skinner Kensal Green, London I once picked up a pencil to underline something on Wikipedia
Cryptocurrency slump erases 2025 financial gains and Trump-inspired optimism
As 2025 comes to a close, Donald Trump’s favorable approach to cryptocurrency has not proven to be enough to sustain the industry’s gains, once the source of market-wide optimism and enthusiasm. The last few months of the year have seen $1tn in value wiped from the digital asset market, despite bitcoin hitting an all-time-high price of $126,000 on 6 October.The October price peak was short-lived. Bitcoin’s price tumbled just days later after Trump’s announcement of 100% tariffs on China sent shockwaves across the market on 12 October. The crypto market saw $19bn liquidated in 24 hours – the largest liquidation event on record
‘This will be a stressful job’: Sam Altman offers $555k salary to fill most daunting role in AI
The maker of ChatGPT has advertised a $555,000-a-year vacancy with a daunting job description that would cause Superman to take a sharp intake of breath.In what may be close to the impossible job, the “head of preparedness” at OpenAI will be directly responsible for defending against risks from ever more powerful AIs to human mental health, cybersecurity and biological weapons.That is before the successful candidate has to start worrying about the possibility that AIs may soon begin training themselves amid fears from some experts they could “turn against us”.“This will be a stressful job, and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately,” said Sam Altman, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based organisation, as he launched the hunt to fill “a critical role” to “help the world”.The successful candidate will be responsible for evaluating and mitigating emerging threats and “tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm”
‘Why should we pay these criminals?’: the hidden world of ransomware negotiations
They call it “stopping the bleeding”: the vital window to prevent an entire database from being ransacked by criminals or a production line grinding to a halt.When a call comes into the cybersecurity firm S-RM, headquartered on Whitechapel High Street in east London, a hacked business or institution may have just minutes to protect themselves.S-RM, which helped a high-profile retail client recover from a Scattered Spider cyber-attack has become a quiet, often word-of-mouth, success.Many of the company’s senior workers are multilingual and have a minimal online footprint, which reveals scant but impressive CVs suggestive of corporate or government intelligence-based careers.S-RM now claims the UK’s largest cyber-incident response team
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