I don't have a problem with competent people doing good jobs "even if they were not elected to anything".  

My concern is that we have just fought a very hard referendum campaign in Ireland where much of the NO argument was driven by British and Irish Eurosceptic arguments about "unelected elites" in Brussels taking over peoples lives and now we seem to be going almost out of our way to appoint someone who fits that description reasonably accurately.

Membership of the British House of Lords (and she is still a peer) does not sit well with most peoples idea of democratic accountability and all sides - even the yes campaign - conceded the EU had some way to go to make the EU institutions appear "closer to the people" and to encourage greater popular identification and emotional involvement with those institutions.

That argument always seemed particularly specious to me when it came from British Eurosceptics with their (frequent) attachments to the House of Lords, "distain for the masses", and attachment to direct democracy only when it came to demanding referenda on the EU.

But it is still an argument and a perception which gained a lot of traction in the campaign and appointing a Peer who has never submitted to a popular election doesn't help that perception.  Politics is about popular engagement as well as administrative competence, and in my view Baroness Ashton has not conclusively demonstrated either.

notes from no w here