His father sat in the House of Lords, and his grandfather and great-grandfather before that. Now Hugh Somerleyton is hoping to win back his birthright, by standing as a candidate in one of Britain’s strangest elections.

Somerleyton, 45, is an aristocratic landowner, farmer, hotelier, and restaurateur. He was born Hugh Crossley. His ancestors made a fortune in the carpet trade. He grew up on a 5,000-acre estate on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, went to Eton, and as a boy served as the Queen’s page of honour, holding the monarch’s robes at state occasions. In 2012, when his father died, he became the 4th Baron Somerleyton, of Somerleyton in the County of Suffolk.

For hundreds of years, men like Somerleyton inherited seats in the House of Lords, as well as land and titles, when their fathers died. But in 1999, Tony Blair’s reforming New Labour government swept all but 90 hereditary peers out of the Lords in an attempt to make the house more democratically representative. From then on, most members would be appointed by the government, on their own merits. The Somerleytons, and many other noble families, lost their position in Westminster. (Another who was excluded was Christopher Guest, the actor and filmmaker behind Spinal Tap. He is the 5th Baron Haden-Guest.)

This week, Somerleyton has the chance to restore his family’s place in the House of Lords, through an obscure parliamentary by-election in which the voters and candidates are exclusively patrician.

A vacancy has arisen in the Lords because of the retirement last month of one of the remaining hereditary peers, a 79-year-old crossbencher — the term for members who are not affiliated to a political party — who was distantly related to Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Under the reforms carried out by Labour 18 years ago, there is a bizarre mechanism for filling that vacancy: Hereditary peers of the same political affiliation are allowed to pick a replacement for the departed member, drawing from the pool of aristocrats who lost their seats in 1999, or their heirs.

This system of by-elections, little known outside small group of people in Westminster who tend to follow these things, is one of the weirdest quirks in an institution famous for weird quirks. It was a constitutional fudge, meant to last only until Labour could complete a second phase of reform — but that reform never happened. Its existence is a source of deep frustration and embarrassment to constitutional reformers and appointed members of the Lords, who believe hereditary succession should have no place in a modern democracy. That a tiny group of noblemen is allowed to award a seat for life in parliament to another nobleman is, to those critics, the most extreme illustration of an institution that is wildly out of touch with the people it is meant to serve.

“If this was a country in Africa, we’d be saying it was wrong,” said David Hanson, a Labour MP who was once Blair’s parliamentary private secretary and has campaigned to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the chamber. “The idea that a self-selecting oligarchy of people, who have been granted a place in parliament by virtue of their ancestors, can vote in another person to vote on issues that affect my constituents’ day-to-day lives is a complete nonsense.”

The by-elections are “the most ludicrous part of our constitutional setup,” said Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, a campaign group.

And yet it is more than just a silly anachronism: The selected candidate will get the right to speak in debates and vote on laws. This is not a small thing when the Lords is more influential and important than it has been in years, and set to play a central role in the parliamentary debate about Brexit. The new member will get to have a say in the legislation that Theresa May needs to pass to lay the legal groundwork for leaving the European Union.

The vote is on Tuesday. Thirty-one crossbench hereditary peers are eligible to vote this time — men with titles like the Earl of Sandwich, the Viscount Colville of Culross, and Lord St John of Bletso. Somerleyton is competing against nine other candidates, who include a 32-year-old multimillionaire whose family owns a chunk of North Wales, a former senior Deutsche Bank executive who once testified to a parliamentary inquiry that the financial crisis wasn’t the fault of bankers, and a retired farmer who was once described by the Daily Mail as the “Council house Viscount” because he lived in public housing, his forebears’ fortune having long since vanished. “I wish to come and give my support for Brexit,” the Council house Viscount said in his candidate statement. “I have been in farming.”