A few days after the general election, I bumped into one of David Cameron’s longest-standing political allies, one of those who had helped him get selected for Witney back in 2000. I remarked that he must be delighted that Cameron had now won a majority. To my surprise, he glumly replied that it would only be significant if Cameron were to create a hundred new peers. Without them, he warned, the govern-ment’s most important measures would end up bogged down in the Lords, where Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined comfortably outnumber the Tories.
Now, normally when people urge the Prime Minister to create new peers it is because they hope that they will be on the list themselves. But this source was one of those rare Westminster beasts with no interest in a peerage and his fear is now being borne out. Since May, the government has lost more than 70 per cent of votes in the Lords. Just this week, the upper house has rejected plans for tax-credit reform even though it normally defers to the elected house where tax is concerned. A week earlier, the Lords decided that they understood what was in the Tory manifesto better than the Tories and defeated the government over subsidies to onshore windfarms. This happened in spite of the Salisbury Convention, which says that the Lords shouldn’t block manifesto commitments.
What is striking about the Lords’ behaviour is the eagerness with which they are picking fights with the government and the elected house. There is little the Tories can do to stop losing votes there. For Monday’s vote they turned out more of their peers than they have for a decade, and still lost. The frequency of these defeats is causing increasing irritation in Downing Street. One senior No. 10 figures fumes that Labour and the Liberal Democrats are ‘treating the revising chamber as a legislative chamber’.
Traditionally, peers have been wary of full-blown confrontation with the government because they know that their legitimacy is questionable and they have no desire to spark a debate about whether or not the Lords should be abolished.
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