Iain McGilchrist speaking today at Pusey House chapel in Oxford. What a gift that good man is to all of us. I think he is the most important public intellectual in the Western world. I wish more people knew about him and his work.

Labour celebrates removing hereditary peers on the principle that birth should not give you a vote in Parliament. Sounds fair enough. But hereditary peers arrive through a strange historical lottery. Within a narrow social class the selection is largely random. Nobody filters them for ideological reliability or party loyalty. Party appointed peers pass through multiple gates. Patronage. donor networks. Think tanks. Political reputation. Filtered systems produce competence but also consensus. Unfiltered systems produce eccentrics but also intellectual outliers. Complex institutions often benefit from a little randomness. The irony is that hereditary peers are aristocratic in origin yet cognitively closer to a random slice of humanity than peers selected by political parties.

@holland_tom was a JOY as guest editor on @BBCr4today - learned, humane and quirky: Japanese toilet ghosts, 800 years of Salisbury Cathedral, AI hallucinations, England in 927 (not 1066) - then a reflective close with a heavenly choir. Also @WalkerMarcus. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002nv…