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Archer to be stripped of title

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON SEPT. 19. Jeffrey Archer, pulp novelist and former deputy chairman of Tory Party who was jailed for perjury and spent two years in prison, is set to be stripped of his title and lose his seat in the House of Lords under a new proposal aimed at ridding the Upper House of members convicted of serious offences.

The proposal, announced by the Blair Government as part of a wider reform of the House of Lords, would remove the anomaly whereby members of the Commons automatically lose their seat if they are convicted but there is no such bar on peers.Ironically, the news came as Lord and soon-to-become `Mr' Archer was delivering his first public lecture after his recent release from jail in what was billed as the start of his self-promoted `comeback' campaign.

But he pointedly refused to react to the bad news, restricting his apparent anger to what one newspaper report described as a "fierce glare over the tops of the glasses''.

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, made clear that membership of Parliament was "a privilege, not a possession''. "We therefore propose that in the future, such peers will forfeit their membership of the House exactly as they would if they were MPs. In addition, they will be deprived of their peerage." The rule would be applied retrospectively. However, disgraced peers would be free to seek renewed membership of the House of Lords by applying to a new appointments commission or to their party.

Though Lord Archer has few friends even among his own partymen, the move was attacked by Tories saying that the decision to apply it retrospectively was `vindictive'.

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