Open door: The style guide editor on… peer pressure and using people’s proper names

Our policy on referring to lords and ladies is impossible to apply consistently and credibly. So, should we drop titles altogether?

Which of these (hypothetical, I emphasise) sentences do you think works better?

Baron Hall of Birkenhead has invited The Lord Lloyd-Webber, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho and Baron Foster of Thames Bank to star in a Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special.

Tony Hall has invited Andrew Lloyd Webber, Martha Lane Fox and Norman Foster to star in a Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special.

Setting aside your views about celebrities, Christmas TV and the licence fee, I hope you agree that, while the first does have a kind of absurdist entertainment value, the second is more effective in communicating who and what we are actually talking about, which in a newspaper is quite important.

When it comes to house style – the internal rules that govern how we write and edit the paper in a consistent and coherent way – some decisions are easy: email (not E Mail, E-mail or e-mail), bitcoin (not Bitcoin – a recent ruling). Others are tougher, not least because to achieve even a rough-and-ready consensus among 500 journalists is tricky; then there are @guardianstyle‘s 45,000 Twitter followers, who are only too ready to pick us up on style points they don’t like, or that we don’t follow consistently. Most importantly, millions of readers around the world need to have confidence that the way we write, as well as what we write about, reflects the values that they expect from the Guardian.

Our policy for several years has been that when referring to peers we call them simply Lord Emsworth, say, at first mention, and thereafter simply Emsworth. But the policy is impossible to apply consistently and credibly. Lord Hall, for example, the BBC director general, is known by one and all (except, perhaps, for a few anti-BBC headbangers on rightwing newspapers) as Tony. Referring to Lloyd Webber as Lord Lloyd-Webber (yes, he gained a hyphen along with his peerage) sounds silly, if not as silly as calling the director of This is Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest, by his title,”5th Baron Haden-Guest”.

A further problem is that, since the explosion in the number of life peers when Tony Blair lost his nerve halfway through reforming the House of Lords, there are so many of them – about 700. So “Lord Smith” could be any one of four people: Baron Smith of Finsbury, Baron Smith of Leigh, Baron Smith of Kelvin, or Baron Smith of Clifton.

This is why we generally say something like “Lord Smith, the former Labour culture secretary”, to avoid confusion with “Lord Smith, chair of the Green Investment Bank”. And so on. No wonder GK Chesterton said: “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive” (for the record, the two current Lord Joneses are both alive and well).

Guardian journalists, and I imagine many readers, are divided on the issue, which we have been discussing this week in an attempt to decide how to describe Baroness Ashton of Upholland, AKA Lady Ashton, Catherine Ashton, Cathy Ashton, or the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. There’s a popular view that we should “drop the Ruritanian flummery” and simply use people’s names, with no titles for anyone. Sounds good, although a lot of people don’t know that “Frederick Howe”, say, is the cabinet minister Lord Howe. Perhaps call people what they call themselves, then? Fine, except that it’s not always easy to establish that. (We still haven’t established definitively whether Ashton prefers Cathy or Catherine.) A more hardline view is that these people accepted their peerages, so they get the title, like it or not. But as I’ve pointed out, half the time no one would know who we were talking about.

The most persuasive argument has been put forward by a colleague who suggests we should use the name that readers – and remember we have many more of those outside the UK than within it – are most likely to recognise: John Prescott, Sebastian Coe, Martha Lane Fox; then Lord Prescott, Lord Coe, Lady Lane-Fox (another Lloyd-Webber hyphenation) on second mention; then just Prescott, Coe, Lane Fox.

This would be fair, more consistent than the current policy, avoids any question of subtexts, works better when you are using search terms or clicking on weblinks, and above all would help the reader. It might not satisfy those who think we should drop the whole rigmarole of titles, but that’s not for us to decide – it’s for the politicians.

If they can get it through the House of Lords.

• For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man’s Quest for Grammatical Perfection, by David Marsh, is published by Guardian Faber.