Peering into a mystery

Owen had been a parliamentary assistant to Johnson in Downing Street with duties no more senior than scheduling meetings for the PM, leading to various wild, untrue and invariably sexist online theories about why she had been chosen to be rewarded. 

Kempsell, a year older than Owen, had served as director of the Conservative Research Department, making him marginally more experienced, but hardly boasting a CV that roars “make this man a legislator for life”.

Now the House of Lords Appointments Commission has been ordered to publish the explanations Johnson provided for sending his former aides to the Upper House. Freedom of information consultant and trainer Martin Rosenbaum won an information tribunal case with the argument that revealing the explanations and other names who backed the pair would be in the public interest.

“I’m very pleased by the decision, which is a boost for transparency and democracy,” he says. “Members of the House of Lords debate and vote on laws that control the British public’s lives. As a basic principle the public is fully entitled to know why they have been appointed to rule over us.”

Alas, the mystery won’t be solved immediately – despite it taking 18 months to get to this point, the House of Lords Appointments Commission could still appeal the verdict. It has until January 22 to decide.

At least we’ll know why the new tranche of peers expected to be announced later today have been chosen – the Labour government made a change recently which says an explanation has to be given for all appointments.

Incidentally, while Owen bore the brunt of attacks over Johnson’s appointments, she has been by far the more diligent of the two, speaking and voting regularly and piloting a backbench bill to ban deepfake pornography. Kempsell, meanwhile, has managed to speak just six times in 17 months and now combines his duties with those of his day job – editor of the anti-elitist Guido Fawkes website.