Sack a British Prince? Easy. Fire a UK Lord? Not So Much

Peter Mandelson’s ties with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein should trigger a reckoning for Britain’s House of Lords. The legitimacy of the 700-year-old second legislative chamber rests heavily on tradition, with members wearing scarlet-and-white ermine robes on ceremonial occasions and referring to each other as “my noble lord” or “the noble baroness.” Seeing a peer of the realm pictured in his underwear in the house of a pedophile sex-trafficker tends to undercut the mystique. The disconnect is becoming untenable.

Mandelson, facing a police investigation for passing internal government communications to Epstein during the global financial crisis, bowed to pressure to resign from the House of Lords on Tuesday. The 72-year-old remains a peer, though, and can only be stripped of that title by act of parliament — a route that hasn’t been used for more than a century. Contrast that with the speed with which King Charles III denuded his brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal prerogatives and associated titles when the former Duke of York’s associations with Epstein became too much for “The Firm” to bear, and the problem becomes glaringly apparent.