Earl of Limerick pens poetic peerage plea for House of Lords seat bid

The people of Limerick may have forgotten they have their own namesake earl in the British aristocracy, but he has remembered to use their world famous way with words in order to fight for a seat in the House of Lords.

The bid by the earl of Limerick — or Christopher Edmund Pery to give him his more normal title — to grab one of the places reserved for hereditary peers in Westminster’s upper chamber has seen him pen a self-mocking poem which stops just short of being a fully-fledged limerick.

One of the peculiarities of Westminster’s upper chamber is that the only members with any hint of a democratic mandate are the 92 hereditary peers who were allowed to remain in the Lords when Tony Blair swept out the rest of the aristocracy.