Parliament has finally woken up – because voters are keeping their MPs in line

They should have seen it coming. A government defeat on an issue of war may be unprecedented, but defeat on the Syria vote did not come out of the blue. You can certainly blame poor party management, failure to prepare the ground, underestimating the poisonous legacy of Iraq — but such failings are common enough. The biggest single factor is one that ministers, the media and MPs themselves have failed to understand: Parliament has changed.

The consensus has long been that Parliament no longer matters. It is assumed to be the docile creature of the government, full of spineless or ambitious MPs who are the slaves of the party whips. In fact, unnoticed and under our noses, that has been becoming progressively less and less true throughout my 30 years in Parliament. The parliamentary kraken, slumbering in the deep, has been gradually awakening. Each successive Parliament since the early 1970s has been harder for the whips to control.