How will the government respond to this peer pressure?

Monday’s night defeats for the government over tax credits in the House of Lords put into lights a problem that many of Cameron’s allies have been worrying about for months, the fact that they keep losing votes in the upper house. Since the election, the government has lost more than 70 per cent of divisions there. There isn’t anything simple that it can do to solve this problem. On Monday night they turned out more Tory peers than they had in a decade but they still couldn’t hold the line.

One thing is clear, the government has no desire to get into a major scrap with the House of Lords. Inside government, there is concern that if they talk too tough on the Lords, they might end up having to do something substantive to reform the upper chamber and that would result in legislative gridlock. As one senior government figure put it to me, they don’t want to go from losing 70 percent of votes in the Lords to losing one hundred percent of the votes there.