Dan Jones: We don’t need Guy Fawkes to rearrange the Lords

One of the things people admire about Britain is the sheer length of time it takes us to get anything done. Roadworks, for example. Test cricket. Developing a coherent approach to Brexit. You can’t rush these things and it wouldn’t pay to try.

Slow and steady have certainly been the watchwords in House of Lords reform, which was first proposed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when Wat Tyler and his medieval Momentum suggested getting rid of all lords, full stop, and dividing lordship “among all men”.

That policy proved too progressive for its time, but the seed was planted, and in 1605 the cause was taken up by Guy Fawkes, Robert Catesby and pals in the Gunpowder Plot.

As you will see this weekend in the BBC drama Gunpowder, starring Kit Harington and Tom Cullen, the November 5 plotters took a bracingly reductionist approach to the Lords: trying to blow the whole place up, so that King James I and every peer in the land would be literally reformed — into little heaps of offal and charcoal.

Catesby was unmoved by the horror of his planned carnage: he thought the lords were all “atheists, fools and cowards”, who deserved nothing less than violent destruction.

Atheists, fools and cowards does not describe (most of) the 800-odd members of today’s House of Lords, but the place is plainly overstuffed, undemocratically appointed, expensive and ripe for thinning out.

It would be wildly unBritish to chuck them all in the Thames and start again, but the proposals under consideration by the Lords to voluntarily introduce a 15-year limit on membership are an excellent step in the right direction: easily the most radical reform of the chamber since 1999.

If Brexit really is a moment to reboot British sovereignty, as its hottest supporters insist, Lords reform should be an essential supporting activity.

So let’s save the gunpowder for scaring the pets on Bonfire Night, and applaud the Lords in their slow but evident willingness to shuffle along with the times.

I’m all for powerful women but can we please stop gendering storms?

My chief bugbear of the autumn is our rising tendency to anthropomorphise weather systems.

This week’s storm, which spared London but hammered Ireland, has not only been named Ophelia, but is routinely gendered in weather reports as though “she” were a naval frigate or female cage fighter.

For example: “Ophelia is heading towards Galway and she’s angry. She’s going to take your roof off and spill your pint… best stay indoors until she’s gone.”

I’m always happy to read about women in positions of power, but really: are we only able to contemplate climate events by pretending that each passing tropical squall is a person in cloud form?

It’s infantile. Worse, I suspect the policy will soon be rolled out to other naturally occurring formations.

One day you’ll be sitting in a traffic jam on the M4 eastbound listening to some simpering BBC 5Live weather reporter telling you to avoid Snarl-Up Sylvia or Logjam Bernard.

You will bang your head on the steering wheel in rage. And then you’ll remember this.

Jamie Oliver’s sweet success

Jamie Oliver has seen positive results for his private tax on sugary drinks, levied at his Jamie’s Italian restaurants. Good for him. Yet it is interesting to learn that Jamie’s sugary drinks policy — a 10p levy which has resulted in a 10 per cent reduction in soda sales — works by informing customers that the extra revenue received will be given to a charity paying for food education and water fountains in schools.

Thus it seems the best way to stop us damaging their own health is to threaten us with a tiny charitable donation to a good cause. This doesn’t say a lot for the great British spirit of giving we hear so much about. But hey: whatever works.

Taylor’s good taste in kebabs

In the days before I got woke to the concept of constant, miserable, sanctimonious healthy eating (see above) I was fond of a kebab shop called Kentish Delight, where I would often repair with friends in the wee hours of a Saturday after carousing in the streets and bars of Camden and Kentish Town. A great and nostalgic thrill, therefore, to learn that Taylor Swift filmed her new pop video in this ugly-lovely doner joint, which she apparently frequents with her current beau, the actor Joe Alwyn.

How times change. Back in the day you seldom saw a pop star there: just the dregs of then-hip north London staggering around looking to ingest as much carbohydrate as they could.

That’s gentrification, I suppose.