Noble Truths

How fabulously on-brand of the Liberal Democrats that 40 per cent of their new life peers should be newly removed hereditary peers. Reform UK should publish the list of the people whom it would have ennobled, and ask what would have been unacceptable about any of them.

Especially since, with Ben Bradley, it has now signed up 22 former Conservative MPs, who no longer even bother to claim that their old party had left them. Rather, their new party has joined them. Bradley was also the Leader of Nottinghamshire County Council until last year. How DOGE was he then? Yet Bradley will still be only 39 in the spring of 2029. And Reform is projected to win Mansfield. Of course.

As for the House of Lords, it has repeatedly rejected even very watered down versions of policies that were in the governing party's manifesto, but woe betide it if it so much as held up a Private Member's Bill that gave effect to a principle that had never been put to the electorate.

That watering down moved Zarah Sultana to vote with Reform in the House of Commons, and this time not to save the Winter Fuel Payment or to lift the two-child benefit cap. In voting to keep every Lords wrecking amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, even on strike ballot thresholds and on trade unions' political funds, Sultana was presumably obeying the "democratic whip" that had been imposed by the Central Executive Committee of Your Party. And was she doing so while drawing only "a worker's wage"? Or have I missed something?

It has been made a commonplace that the seven Labour MPs who lost the whip for having voted to lift the two-child benefit cap that was now going to be lifted anyway had "voted against the Budget". That is a lie. They had voted for an amendment to the Humble Address after the King's Speech, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted for that Address. Withdrawal of the whip used to be the ultimate sanction. But it happens all the time now, in the authoritarian spirit of the Government's treatment of the country at large.