By Paul Goodman
The headline should probably read: "Man who's already a peer receives a peerage", but there's a certain formality to the way we try to write under this "Gazette" section.
The Downing Street website announced earlier this morning that Michael Ancram, the former Party Chairman, Shadow Foreign Secretary, Party leadership contender and Minister in John Major's Government, is to go to the House of Lords.
He's already the Thirteenth Marquess of Lothian, and while his father was alive was once known by the courtesy title of the Earl of Ancram - a title he eventually dropped, for reasons unrelated to having once been announced at a party as "Mr Norman Crumb".
His father was a hereditary peer with no entitlement to sit in the Lords. Ancram thus wasn't barred from the Commons after his father's death. Now he travels to where a hereditary peerage will no longer automatically take him.
