Is that definitely right? The initial post-reform ballot to allow some hereditaries to sit was broken down along party lines, with the allocation being in proportion to the pre-reform party affiliation (and cross-bench, of course). There were a grand total of two Labour hereditary peers in that first cohort. There can’t possibly be an electorate of one when the first of them dies.
Almost got it - if you’re not a sitting excepted hereditary peer, you cannot vote for a replacement hereditary. With the seat comes the vote. Otherwise, you’re absolutely right.
That may be a matter of opinion, actually. I wouldn’t pass up being in the Commons, and the Lords certainly has influence! Although opting to go from being a sitting MP to being an excepted hereditary would be seen as a bit of a blow to your power.
Party makeup is down to gentlemanly convention that no single party has a majority there; in the last ten years, they have sought to make party balance in the Lords broadly approximate to voter share in the last election (as the system used to elect the Commons does not correlate to voter share terribly well), so, for example, the Tories and Labour are the two main parties and so are at the moment fairly equal (Labour has slightly more), while the Lib Dems are a smaller but still relevant block.
There’s also the Crossbenchers: Members with no party label. They are, as a group, broadly the same size as the Labour and Tory factions, and arguably are being treated as a group ‘representing’ those who didn’t bother to vote.
This convention only really governs the major parties. Smaller parties it’s pretty fluid, although there aren’t many or they stand as Independents or Crossbenchers. We’ve currently got three UKIP Members in there, and until a few years ago there was a Green. There’s some Welsh and Northern Irish as well.
The House of Lords has also been graced by a Communist.
The BBC’s democracy pages have a very useful graphical breakdown of party balance. Look at the right hand side of this page.
No, you have no say in the Lords hereditary mini-election now. You did when reform first happened, in order to populate that category of member, but no longer.
Yes, you can stand as an MP.
Yes.
Correct. You can renounce your peerage though. I don’t know if there is a mechanism for elected-hereditary peers to resign from the Lords, but I imagine that one would be found if the situation arose.
No.
I would wager an elected-hereditary could renounce their peerage a la the Viscount Stansgate, but in this day and age why they would after going through the rigmarole of being elected in…
By the end of this Parliament, we may finally have on the Statute Book provisions to allow Lords to retire, and, presumably, regain the right to vote and stand for MP.
Yes, if they’re not members of the Lords. Which has been questioned from two opposing principles.
Either, so one argument goes, everyone should be represented in only one House, which would mean that all the hereditaries are barred from voting in elections for the Commons, on the grounds that they get to vote in elections for the Lords. Much in the way that Scottish and Irish peers were barred from voting in elections for the Commons in the days when they instead voted for Scottish and Irish representative peers.
Or all peers, including those with seats in the Lords, should have the right to vote in elections for the Commons, just as the members of upper houses in most Western democracies have the right to vote in elections for their lower houses.
This recent briefing note by the House of Lords Library sets out the legal issues in some detail. The arguments have been surprisingly long-running.
Except that there are currently time limits on when an hereditary can renounce their peerage, which would almost certainly have elapsed by the time they got the chance to get elected to the Lords. (Unless it was the death of the previous holder that had created the vacancy.)
That’s what I meant really - “I don’t want to have any part of the legislature any more, but not give up my family’s historic advantage in getting prime restaurant bookings”
That was discussed in the opening scene of the movie The Queen. One simply doesn’t vote when one is the monarch, does one?
Ah - I didn’t realise there was a time limit! Makes sense though.
Not much point, really. Buckingham Palace falls within the London and Westminster constituency, which is a very safe Conservative seat (and by “very safe” I mean it’s gone Tory in every election since it was drawn in the fifties.)
So if Her Majesty wanted to actually influence politics and/or to flex long-dormant monarchial muscles she’d just refuse to invite the majority leader to form a government. 
Request for clarification: are we saying that peers who are not members of the House of Lords have a vote in the by-elections that come up when one of the 92 places for hereditary peers becomes vacant? I didn’t realise that those people had any role in Parliament any more.
No. They can stand for election to fill a vacancy, but only those hereditary peers of that party that are already in the House may vote.
OK, thanks. **APB **seemed to be saying that they could vote in House of Lords elections.
Well, if it is, as your link says, “considered unconstitutional” for her to vote, then she can’t do it, not even in theory. The statement in your link that the law does not explicitly bar her from voting means, I’d say, that there is no statute that includes a specific provision excluding her from elections. But in a country with a largely unwritten, conventions-based constitution such as the UK, something may be unconstitutional even though it is not written down anywhere, and if it’s unconstitutional, then she can’t do it.