Tony Blair will this week appoint a low-key selection of Labour loyalists to the House of Lords.

Rumours that the children's writer JK Rowling had been picked have been denied. "She's not on our list and I'm sure she wouldn't be on anyone else's," said one Whitehall source.

Philip Gould, the prime minister's focus group and polling specialist, will become a peer, as will the former director of the LSE and intellectual theorist of the third way, Anthony Giddens.