By the time they stop being mad, politicians are the right age for the House of Lords

HUGO RIFKIND This is a column about the reform of the House of Lords. I have a hunch it might not look like one, probably until pretty much the end, but that is what it is. Try to remember this if, at times, it appears to be about something else.

'They should just clone ministers,' says the Hugh Abbott character in The Thick Of It (2005), 'so we're born at 55 with no past and no flats and no genitals.'

How dated that seems, already. Flats, pasts and genitals remain problematic, true enough, but 55 has become unacceptably ancient. What is a suitable age, these days, for a senior MP? Fortyish? David Miliband, at 42, seems to be about optimum. Sir Menzies Campbell, all the way up at a lofty 66, never had a hope. You could see it in the chamber. He was the Grandpa Simpson of the House of Commons. When he spoke, MPs looked, then looked away, then spoke more loudly of whatever they were speaking of before.

Political youth, though, is puzzling. For months now, I have been working on a theory to try to understand why the Conservative party is in such terrible trouble. Obviously, it has developed problems within the past couple of weeks, what with the Conservative party suddenly not being in trouble at all. Still, that is not my fault. I was keen to figure out why, despite being only a few years older than I am, the new young stars of the Tories appear to be so utterly unlike me or anybody I know. I'm public school. I'm Oxbridge. My Facebook account should be bursting with George Osbornes. Yet untill briefly met Osborne himself I had never met any. The many Tories I know today have emerged, carefully, over the past couple of years. As students, they would have been more likely to declare themselves keen connoisseurs of whalemeat.

For the entirety of the 1990s, in other words, one simply did not admit to being a Conservative in polite, youthful society. Thus, runs my theory, the only people who did were people who were either too mad or too posh to know it was wrong. A case overmade, perhaps, but I hope you will see a kernel of truth in it. Spun differently, it could work on the other side. Left or Right, young politicians are not normal. If they were, they would not be young politicians.

It need not matter, being young and mad. Many of us grow peculiar as we age. Politicians, for the most part, do the opposite. William Hague, at 46, has come on leaps and bounds since his early years. These days, you can almost imagine him using shops. Yet his clock is ticking. Also, unusually for clocks, it is shrinking. By the time he is middle-aged, and as normal, say, as lain Duncan Smith, he will be an obsolete old veteran. Just like poor old Sir Ming.

It is a truism to state that the younger generation will one day be the older generation, but it bears thinking about. One day, David Cameron will be stout and goutish, and start saying arch things about his successors before party conferences. Ed Miliband will struggle to send a holo-text on his new mobile phone. Patches of pink will start appearing in the golden thatch of Boris Johnson. These will be men in their prime. Perhaps they will be 55. Finally, they will hardly be mad at all.

What will they all do? Will the back benches even be an option? By then, constituencies will be seeking teenagers as candidates, Emily Benns of 17. The foreign secretary will be 23, and looking out over his shoulder, nervously, for a younger man. 'He's past it!' we will all crow, of a man who loses a Liberal Democrat leadership election at 31. Pretty soon our children will be voting at 16, despite the bulk of our population edging towards their pensions.

And where will they all go? The Camerons and Osbornes and Balls and Milibands and all the rest. All that knowledge and experience and time spent learning how not to be mad, and nobody will even think of voting for them because they don't know how to work the 2025 equivalent of an iPod.

What can we do to preserve all this, in the future, as the House of Commons irrevocably turns into a warped version of The X Factor? As mad youth overcomes all, perhaps we could have some kind of second legislative house, which values experience and knowledge and calm reflection. Although perhaps we already do, and perhaps we are trying to get rid of it. See? I did promise. This is a column about the reform of the House of Lords.

r at least that bit of it was. This bit is a column about robbing banks. Did you know that hardly anybody in Britain seems to bother any more? From 2005 to 2006 there were only 30 successful bank stickups across the whole country, and only about twice that many which failed. A clear indication, this, of the apathetic depths to which Britain's criminal underclass has sunk. They cannot even be bothered to be criminals any more.

Compare this to Italy of all places, where over 3,000 bank robberies were attempted — some 57 per cent of the European total. Whatever happened to the great Protestant work ethic? And this is energetic stuff. The Guardian quotes one Ferrara bank clerk who says, 'Four robbers with wigs and masks came in speaking English, French and Spanish among themselves to avoid identification, and fled on bicycles.'

You have to wonder about these bicycles. Do bicycles really make for a swift, reliable getaway? Were they all affixed safely to the railings outside, front wheels and saddles removed, D-lock through the frame? Did the robbers all run out, each fumbling with a key and a mini-spanner? Or is Italy a country where a man feels entirely comfortable leaving his bicycle unlocked outside a bank, wheels and all, even while he is inside robbing it?

Most robberies, say the Italian authorities, are the work of `small-time crooks, usually armed with knives not guns'. The surge, they say, is due both to a large prisoner amnesty in Italy's jails (whoops) and to a major increase in the number of Italian banks. The latter would seem to suggest that more people in Britain would rob banks, if only they could find them. There is an element of truth in that, I suppose. You don't hear much about Post Office robberies these days, do you?

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.

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