The Peerage Act

As part of my next TL, going from 1951 to 1964, I want to see if there is any plausibility in the Peerage Act being introduced in 1951 allowing MP's to relinquish any peerages, baronets or titles to allow them to remain in the House. OTL, the act came in in 1963 when Douglas-Home became PM.

The idea for introducing the act in my new TL is that Churchill upon returning to power wants to appoint a peer (Beaverbook atm) as Chancellor of the Exchequer meaning he has to be from the Commons.
 
Basically, I intend for the Peerage Act to be introduced earlier and as such give Alec Douglas-Home a longer premiership as he remained in the House of Commons for all his career, rather than OTL as I feel that one of history's most modest and honourable Prime Minister's is given a rather bad bashing in history books.
 
I don't know too much about the reasoning behind the Peerage Act when it came about but I'm curious...Why didn't they just make a rule that a peer cannot sit in the House of Lords should he or she be elected to the House of Commons without having to disclaim their peerage. Seems kind of reasonable to me. There were enough MPs with courtesy titles and Irish peers over its history. What would have been the problem?

I've also wondered why they didn't limit the number of peers allowed to sit in the House of Lords to the number that would fit in the chamber comfortaby without anyone parking their noble butts on the woolsack. The peers could have an election and voted in a limited number of able men (hopefully) who could have taken care of the chamber's business.

But what do I know...I'm just a colonial from the other side of the pond.
 
They didn't go the route you suggested because that would not permit peers who simply wanted to disclaim their titles without going into the Commons to do so (there have been a few). There's no reason apart from government disinterest and constitutional inertia that this measure wasn't carried out before 1963 - it was proposed often enough. It was only once we got the farcical situation of Anthony Wedgewood Benn forcing multiple by-elections in his Bristol seat and winning handily, and then being denied entry to the Commons, that the government felt a compelling need to do something about it.

Schemes for Lords reform were brought up numerous times during the early/mid twentieth century, more often than not by Tory grandees such as the Marquess of Salisbury who wanted to revitalise the Upper House and push for a more active role in the grand scheme of things - as well as to provide a more legitimised platform for the landed interest. Again though these measures failed because successive governments just weren't interested in upsetting the constitutional framework - especially once Tory politicians realised that Labour wasn't going to use a Commons majority to force through mass confiscation of private property.
 
Quintin Hogg' s father, Viscount Hailsham, died in 1950 and Hogg inherited the title. He was Conservative MP for Oxford and he did not want to leave the House of Commons and sit in the House of Lords. In the end he did go to the Lords.
 
My reasoning was that the Lord's doesn't read financial bills and so to accept the Treasury, Beaverbrook would need to sit in the Commons and relinquish his peerage which is why I need this act to pass.
 
Nitpick, a baronet is not a peerage, it's a hereditary knighthood that doesn't come with a seat in the House of Lords so there never was any barrier to one sitting in the House of Commons.
 
Yes, I was thinking that the issue of Beaverbrook for the Treasury and the 1st Viscount Benn's death occur at the same time which bounces through the act before the end of 1951.
 
Beaverbrook is I suspect an implausible choice for the Treasury. He's too old, he probably hasn't got the desire, the inclination or the character for the job and he's widely distrusted within the Conservative Party. Plus he is a bogeyman to the Labour Party and trade unions, which was a consideration of surprising importance back then. I can't really think of an alternative Chancellor from the Lords - Viscount Swinton? Or perhaps a Cecil develops an interest in economics.
 
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