My thoughts this time start with a death, and one that deserves to be noted in the recycling sector. Those of us longer of tooth in recycling will remember Earl Ferrers, who had responsibility for recycling policy as a Minister in the Department of Environment from 1995-1997. He was the 13th Earl, and recently passed away aged 83 with the title passing to his eldest son.

In many respects he was a classic of his type: from a long aristocratic line, educated at Winchester and Cambridge, served in the Coldstream Guards on his National Service in Malaya. Where he was distinctive was in his extensive service in government, as he held ministerial office in every Conservative government from 1962 to 1997, which included service under five prime ministers: Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Heath, Thatcher and Major.

He managed 35 years of ministerial service without having to be elected by the public once, although he did stand in one election and did rather well – he came top of the poll in 1999 for the election by Peers of the 92 hereditary Peers that were allowed to stay in the reformed House of Lords by the new Labour government.

Undoubtedly he was a popular and solid figure in the Lords, reflected in his vote, and his Telegraph obituary described him as a ‘Wodehousian figure’ that served modestly and didn’t always take himself too seriously.

We saw this at first hand in the year he was booked to speak at the LARAC Conference in the mid ’90s. The conference organisers were put into a tizzy when advised that he was running seriously late and they had to reorder the morning schedule. When he arrived, he marched down the gangway to the podium and in his opening remarks said something like: “Awfully sorry chaps, no point in making an excuse – it was a total cock up. Slept through the alarm, slept through the second alarm – and missed the train. Nothing else for it, a total cock up. Terribly sorry!”

In a moment of aristocratic disarming briskness, he had the audience in the palm of his hand. No matter that he didn’t have much terribly useful to say on the government’s recycling policy, we were charmed. Please don’t think me disrespectful of the deceased – by his own admission in his autobiography he sometimes had a light hand on the detailed tiller of government but was always relied upon by successive Conservative leaders to be a solid part of the team, especially when acting as Deputy Leader of the Lords.

One might say that we British have been rather used to being ruled by the unelected. Indeed, in waste and recycling we are quite used to it – the recent seamless transition from one unelected peer (Lord Henley) to another (Lord Taylor) and then another (Lord de Mauley) responsible for waste and resources policy led me to consider how often this has happened in recent times. My back-of-the-envelope calculation reckons that in the last 30 years of waste policy, we have had a majority of our responsible ministers sitting in the unelected Lords rather than in the Commons. The most notable change to this trend came under the last Labour government where we mainly had MPs as our ministers – not that they were necessarily any better; in some cases, they were notably worse.

And so it goes on. Some are born to rule, most are born (we hope) to recycle – and often the two go hand in hand when it comes to government. I wish Lord de Mauley well in his ministerial post of Resources Minister – maybe the lack of the burden of accountability to an electorate might come in handy when it comes to policy making!