Around The House

A fascinating telephone call from an old associate who turns out to be a regular reader.

Yes, I am assured, a certain number of "rebels", deliberately drawn from as wide a cross-section as possible of Labour MPs, was authorised to vote against Second Reading of the Lords Reform Bill, but Labour had a formal policy of voting for it in order to bring on all the fun and games on the other side over it, as well as to permit as many Conservatives as possible to vote against it, which scores of them would never have done if it had meant voting with Labour.

Yes, I am assured, Sir George Young withdrew the Programme Motion so that his "rebel" backbenchers could go back to their constituencies and pose as principled insurrectionists, which would have been impossible if most of them had voted with the Government on the Programme Motion, as most of them would have done, since voting for it would have involved voting with Labour.

And yes, I am assured, the plan is to let the other side tear itself to pieces until Third Reading, when Labour's line will be that that vote is on the appalling final text rather than on the general principle, when Miliband will claim to have "listened to views from all sections of my party" (from David Blunkett, to Frank Field, to Dennis Skinner), and when Labour will duly vote against.

As much as anything else, that will have the effect that was had by Labour's eventual official vote against Maastricht, rather than an official line to abstain while tolerating three times as many votes against (and not a single one in favour) as there were from among the much more numerous Conservative MPs: all of the supposedly principled Tory rebels will very visibly vote with the Government rather than vote with Labour, just as all but one of them, who merely failed to turn up, did in that event. The Dog's Breakfast House thus created will thus be entirely attributable to the Conservatives and to the Lib Dems, since "We voted against it, but all of theirs voted in favour of it."

My interlocutor is the latest person to suggest that I am some sort of loss to the Whips Office, not least because I am "such an obvious product of the North East machine that created Ted Short, Derek Foster, Hilary Armstrong and Nick Brown." The very idea...

In any case, they are obviously doing perfectly well in there without me. Let the entertainment begin.