House of lords

Nick Clegg didn’t mention the boundary reforms once in the statement he gave to the House of Commons on the death of the House of Lords Reform Bill. The Deputy Prime Minister knew he wouldn’t need to wait long for an opportunity to talk about it, though, and he was right: Harriet Harman raised the changes to constituencies as soon as she stood up to respond. Seizing on the Liberal Democrats’ decision to oppose the changes as revenge for the failure of their attempts to reform the upper chamber, Harman told Clegg that Labour thought the work of the Boundary Commission should stop immediately, given the cost of it continuing

Nick Clegg’s decision to scupper boundary reviews in retaliation for the failure of his Lords reform programme is the very opposite of ‘mature’ government. It is the politics of the sand pit: you have annoyed me, so I’m going to kick your sandcastle down. It’s his way of putting a horse’s head in Cameron’s bed, and the public will be appalled. The coalition has entered a new, destructive phase where Lib Dems will now pride themselves on what Tory measures they can frustrate or destroy (O Levels, profitmaking schools etc). I’ve just been on the Today programme with David Hall Matthews of the Social Liberal Forum, who claimed that Clegg’s

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Nick Clegg’s decision not to support the 2015 boundary changes as a ‘penalty’  for Lords reform not happening is that Downing Street is insisting on pushing on with the matter. I’m told that Number 10 will ‘do everything we can to persuade everyone we can to vote for them.’ When I put it to this senior Cameroon that this was futile given that with Lib Dem ministers and MPs voting against, there was no chance of getting it through the Commons, the source said ‘is it feasible [to get the boundary changes through], yes’. There are two possibilities here. One is that Cameron is

The conventional wisdom about the consequences of the failure of Lords reform is that the Liberal Democrats will wreak their revenge for the Conservatives’ ‘breach of contract’ by scuppering the boundary changes. Over the past few months, the party has taken great pains to link the two reforms, and now that it is clear that the first will not go through, all focus is on the second. There is much that still needs to become clear about how this will work; the biggest question of all being how Lib Dem ministers can vote against the changes without being sacked. But don’t expect the whole party to troop through the ‘no’

In recent weeks, Downing Street has been repeatedly told by Tory MPs that if proposals for an elected element in the House of Lords were brought back to the Commons, the next rebellion would be even bigger than the 91 who voted against second reading. Downing Street, as the Telegraph reported this morning, has now accepted that Lords reform will have to be dropped and there is talk of a formal announcement to this effect as early as Monday. But, intriguingly, I understand that David Cameron does not intend to abandon efforts to get the boundary reforms through. This, as Isabel noted this morning, has the potential to cause a

At the top of the coalition there’s a concerted effort to calm tensions, to de-escalate after its ‘Cuban missile crisis’. As part of that, I understand that David Cameron has indicated privately that if the Lib Dems do not get their elected peers, he won’t push the matter of the boundary reforms. I’m told he has no desire to end up in a situation where he’s sacking Lib Dem ministers en masse for voting against the government. Although, officially Number 10 is still stressing that it expects government ministers to vote for them when they come back to the House of Commons. The Prime Minister is, I’m told, currently considering

Two rather interesting reconciliations are taking place today. Ed Miliband is making the first speech of a Labour leader at the Durham Miners’ Gala since 1989. And Nick Clegg has been trying to charm the left of his party into believing that all is well in the Liberal Democrat world. The latter largely involved Clegg trying to encourage the left-leaning Social Liberal Forum’s annual conference to develop a sort of persecution complex. So the audience was told not to ‘underestimate how much the right and the left want to destroy us’, and to remember that ‘if we aren’t going to stick up for ourselves, no-one else will’. It was difficult,

Jesse Norman became the hero of the hour yesterday afternoon when the government admitted defeat against the Tory rebels and dropped the programme motion on Lords reform. Norman was keen to claim the victory for his rebel operation, making an early intervention to say: ‘Let me make it clear from the Conservative benches that the very substantial opposition from within the Conservative party, not just that from Labour, was responsible for the withdrawal of the motion. That should be perfectly clear and reflected in the record.’ As leader of the rebel camp, and a member of the 91 who voted against the second reading of the Bill late last night,

‘Shouldn’t we just go home?’ the SNP’s Pete Wishart asked Sir George Young this evening after the Leader of the House revealed the government was dropping its programme motion on the House of Lords. ‘You know it’s all over. They know it’s all over,’ he added. But they didn’t go home, and the Commons has just voted in favour of the second reading 462 votes to 162. Early reports suggest that there were 86 Conservative MPs who defied the whip, which would make this the biggest rebellion in this parliament. Nick Clegg paused from trying very hard not to grimace on the front bench to cheer as Mark Harper told