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Perspective is a beautiful thing.

If you’re Tory donor, millionaire hedge fund boss and life peer Michael Farmer the House of Lords does important work, is filled with experts in lots of things, and £300 a day is chicken feed.

If you’re just about anyone else, the House of Lords does important work, is filled with jokers and £300 a day would make you cluck with delight.

(Image: Rowan Griffiths / Daily Mirror)

Lord Farmer told the Lords last week: “Caricatures abound of ermine-clad peers swilling champagne and swanning around your Lordships’ house at the taxpayer’s expense.

“That may sell newspapers, but it does not give anything of the true facts. A highly distorted myth is relentlessly peddled of everyone with their snouts in the trough, greedily pocketing £300 a day for turning up.”

This “caricature” is perhaps linked to complaints from members of the Lords that the food in their eight subsidised restaurants included “hake [that] was completely unadorned”, “heavy yoghurt”, and that the vintage wine had gone up by 30p a glass.

Luckily they can still get lobster and caviar for £15 or ask the queen nicely for a swan, so none have yet starved.

(Image: Photoshot)

We’ve learned, in recent times, the “true facts” concerning alleged sex pest Lord Rennard, the coke-and-hookers downtime of Lord Sewel, and the 29 peers who claimed a total of £750,000 in expenses without once uttering a word in a debate.

From Lord Farmer’s perspective, such stories give the entire house a bad name and involve just a handful of the 800-odd peers, many of whom aren’t sex pests, don’t use drugs or hookers, and do take part.

From everyone else’s perspective, half of them don’t bother to turn up at all.

In 2009-10 only 388 or 47% of peers attended over 68 days. Last year the figure was 483, or 60%, over 126 days.

Just 31 have an official leave of absence – judges, royals, a few criminals and those with a sick note. The remaining 300 or so are AWOL.

In 2015 the house sat for just 6.5 hours a day, for which the Lords could each get the equivalent of £46.15 per hour.

And not a single penny of it was subject to tax.

To get the same amount of pay in your pocket for hours worked in the private sector, you’d be looking at a taxable salary of £150,000 pro rata.

Oh, and you’d be expected to work 253 full days for it.

(Image: Getty)

Anyway, in his speech Lord Farmer compared this to plumbers’ bills per hour (strangely he didn’t point out you pay one to take crap away and the other to multiply the stuff) and said that being a lord “restricts their earning opportunities elsewhere”.

And I’m sure it does, if you’re used to managing a £2.5bn hedge fund.

But for the rest of us getting £37,800 to do four short days a week for a third of the year would give us plenty of time to do something else.

Working out how to bitch about the cheapest caviar you’ll ever be served, perhaps, or developing a publicly interesting perversion.

(Image: Swansea University)

Which is not to say that the House of Lords is not a great and marvellous thing.

It’s the Lords that smacked down the Tories’ tax credit cuts. It’s the Lords which scrutinizes, amends and weeds out for sanity’s sake the dodgy laws pushed through by MPs.

The average age of members is 69, and they have been known to debate all night on important issues.

They have, between them, an invaluable reserve of wisdom and experience from many walks of life and as fewer than 200 of them are former MPs the vast majority are NOT career politicians.

(Image: Photoshot)

If the Lords were entirely elected, it’d be FULL of politicians.

It’d be more than likely to either rubber-stamp or automatically trash everything our MPs put forward.

And you can bet your bottom dollar they’d want more pay – MP salaries last year equated to £532 each for every day Parliament was sitting.

If the House of Lords was abolished, or we allowed it to be reformed by the pigs who live next door, we’d mourn its loss in less than a week.

(Image: Rex)

But Lord Farmer said one thing that is absolutely true.

He told the Lords: “If our contribution is to be considered worthy of public funding, the public need to value and understand the work we do.”

He meant, I presume, that the public are stupid and the media are mean and WAAAH IT’S SO UNFAIR.

But unless the public see what they get for their money, and approve of it, the House of Lords’ days are numbered.

Which is why we need to get the public into it.

And not just for a sightseeing trip, when we’re asked to pay £25 for the privilege of even gazing upon the red cushions our bums aren’t allowed to fart on.

I mean chuck out those who don’t turn up. Bin all the Lords who’ve been within a sniff of fraud, a cocaine sting or Jeffrey Archer. Ditch the bishops, the inherited titles, and anyone who’s ever met a lobbyist.

To the four peers we’d have left we could add one person from every constituency, selected randomly as with jury service, who would be a lord or lady for a year.

They could spend a set number of days a year checking the power of government, reminding the MPs who’s boss, and provide the kind of experience that counts – business owners, nurses, single mums, grandparents, migrants.

And we could pay them £300 a day, tax-free.

With an average wage of £26,500 few would complain it wasn’t enough to make ends meet.

They probably wouldn’t mind the yoghurt, we wouldn’t need to provide subsidised caviar, and they’d not expect to get paid if they didn’t do any work.

We’d get more expertise, not less; we’d have fewer placemen put there by Prime Ministers to override opposition; and we’d get a Lords we all had a crack at being part of.

Of course you won’t hear anyone in the House of Lords suggest it any more than you’d hear turkeys suggest a roast dinner in December.

Instead we’ll have to put up with the nation’s most expensive food bank, a plumber’s bill remarkable mainly for the extra s*** we put up with, and the likes of Lord Farmer giving us the benefits of his perspective.

But oh, if only...