Life Peer
He stood down in 1992, and was made a life peer that same year, as Baron Weatherill, of North East Croydon in the London Borough of Croydon. As is customary for former speakers, the government put before the House of Commons an address to the Queen, asking that Weatherill be appointed a peer as a mark of "royal favour". Given a rare opportunity to discuss constitutional arrangements relating to the monarch and the Upper House, left-wing members of Parliament forced a debate on the petition.
It was reported in several newspapers that Weatherill would be granted an earldom, The Earl of Wetheral. This did not come to fruition.
He sat in the House of Lords as a crossbencher.
In 1993, he was elected alternate Convenor of the Crossbench Peers, and was a convenor from 1995 until 1999. In the House of Lords he made a major contribution to the House of Lords Act 1999 by stitching together the compromise that allowed a limited number of hereditary peers to remain as members.
In 2006, he became Patron of the Better Off Out campaign, calling for Britain to leave the European Union.
Read more about this topic: Bernard Weatherill
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or peer:
“O, reason not the need! our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The Peer now spreads the glitt’ring Forfex wide,
T’inclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)