Shaun Ley's week

By Shaun Ley Presenter, BBC Radio 4's World at One

An Edwardian comedy of manners had uncanny modern-day echoes

This column is in danger of becoming a theatre review, at least whenever I write it.

Last month, a production of Loot seemed to chime with the problems affecting the Metropolitan Police. This month, it's an older play that provided me with an insight into an even older institution: the House of Lords.

The play is Mary Goes First, an Edwardian drawing room comedy, just coming to the end of a six-week revival at The Orange Tree, a theatre perhaps more associated with the radical plays of Vaclav Havel.

Yet 1913, the year it was written, wasn't a bad one for political reformers. It was only a couple of years since Asquith's government achieved perhaps the single most significant change in the Lords before or since, ending the power of peers to block changes - in this case a budget - on which the elected House of Commons insisted.

The allegations made in recent days - of peers using their legislative influence for financial gain - is a reminder of the paradox which the House of Lords remains, one which the government has been unable to unravel, 11 and a half years after it was first elected, promising its own radical reform.

Pecking order

Mary Goes First is a wonderful evocation of the peculiar mix of vanity, snobbery and hard politics which explains the modern House of Lords.

Although written long before Lloyd George's estrangement from his party made expedient the blatant auction of peerages for political donations, that idea was sufficiently in the news to raise laughs on the West End stage.

Mary Whichello has been the society belle of the fictitious town of Warkinstall. But the recent award of a knighthood to Thomas Bodsworth, manufacturer, Mayor, and provider of the town's new sanatorium ("Oh, yes. I saw his name in the New Year's honours last week