Mr Blair and the fine art of retreat

This column will contain no further mention of doctors, nurses, hospitals, casualty departments or distressed old ladies, not because they are unimportant – far from it – but because I suspect that by now most readers will have heard quite enough about them for the time being. I should like to turn instead to a development which has been insufficiently noticed: the disposition of the Government to accept defeats or setbacks and carry on with as good a grace as it can muster.

The most recent example concerns the reform of the Lords. Last Thursday the Lord Chancellor appeared before a Commons committee to explain himself. This is not what any Lord Chancellor likes to do. The exalted nature of the post is knocked into them from their earliest legal days. Certainly Lord Irvine dislikes giving an explanation of his actions. But on this occasion he was unusually candid.

It had been thought that he had been, maybe not the only begetter, but certainly Mr Tony Blair's principal agent in restricting the proportion of elected peers to a derisory 20 per cent or thereabouts. Not a bit of it, Lord Irvine insisted. He had merely been chairman of a Cabinet committee which had produced the proposals. On the committee had sat also Mr Robin Cook, the Leader of the Commons, and Lord Williams of Mostyn, who finds himself in the same position in the Lords as successor to the unlamented Lady Jay.

Lord Williams is a wily Welshman with a plausible manner. It is being predicted that he will succeed Lord Irvine before this government is out. For myself, I think he would be better at the Home Office (a department in which he previously served) than the bullying, ignorant and resentful Mr David Blunkett, who seems to believe that his future depends on flattering Mr Blair at every opportunity.

No matter. The immediate point is that Lord Williams is seen as someone whose heart is not in the Blair-Irvine proposals. He may defend them, but as if he is back at the Bar defending assorted villains, as he successfully did in the Jeremy Thorpe case. The same goes for Mr Cook. His heart is not in it either. Indeed, unlike Lord Williams, he has allowed it to be known that he favours an elected intake of 50 per cent. Lord Irvine now echoes the plea heard in classrooms down the years:

"It wasn't my fault, miss. It was Tony Blair that made me do it. Gareth Williams and that Robin Cook were there as well."

This is an entirely understandable response. There is a disposition to blame Lord Irvine when things go wrong and to give him insufficient credit for his achievements. He is one of the few reforming Lord Chancellors. By comparison Lord Hailsham, who had a memorial service in Westminster Abbey last week and, like Lord Irvine, two spells in the job, was a complete loafer. He talked a good game but did little else of any consequence.

Lord Irvine has, by contrast, devolved power to Scotland and Wales and produced both the Human Rights Act, which may turn out to be his monument, and the Freedom of Information Act. Over the last, alas, he made several concessions to Mr Jack Straw as Home Secretary. But the changes amount to an impressive body of work none the less.

Lord Irvine remains a loyal servant – Wolsey, to use his own unhappy comparison, to Mr Blair's Henry VIII – to the extent that he is still unwilling to countenance an increase in the proportion of elected members of the second chamber. But what will he do when the king changes his mind? At Prime Minister's Questions Mr Blair left himself in what Field-Marshal Montgomery used to call a position of balance. "Consensus?" he asked. Yes, indeed. There was no greater enthusiast for this desirable condition than he. But where precisely was the holy grail to be located? Everyone wanted a different proportion of elected peers.

Just so. The consensus is that everyone, including Mr Iain Duncan Smith, wants a higher proportion than the Prime Minister is prepared to accept. He has two choices: to concede a higher figure – Mr Cook's 50 per cent seems a reasonable compromise – or to allow the proposals to lapse, as Harold Wilson allowed a previous Labour government's attempt at Lords reform, the Crossman-Carrington proposals in the Parliament (No 2) Bill, to fall by the wayside in 1969. The Blair-Irvine proposals will almost certainly not now go forward in their original form.

Nor is this the only recent example of retreat. Mr Blunkett had to jettison that whole portion of his Prevention of Terrorism Act which created a new offence extending the old law of blasphemy. This had been intended as a sop to the Mohammedans in our midst or, at any rate, to some of their largely self-appointed leaders: a quid pro quo for the main provisions in the Bill which, some thought, were directed against them. Despite a few outstanding speeches in the Commons opposing the clauses in question, the Bill as presented originally by Mr Blunkett was scuppered by the Lords.

Similarly, Mr Blair is reluctant to proceed with the measure prohibiting hunting with dogs. He knows that it will be rejected or substantially modified by the upper house and that he may have to use the Parliament Act to enact it in pristine form. A more powerful consideration for him is that the Bill will bring about demonstrations, marches, lobbies, hostile leading articles, fusses of all kinds which Mr Blair is anxious to avoid.

In all three illustrations the position of the backbenchers is different. Over hunting they would like Mr Blair to proceed: but he temporises. Over Lords reform they would throw out his proposals and substitute something else: here they will probably succeed in part. Over the new blasphemy law they were uneasy but did little in the lobbies: effective resistance was left to the upper house.

The moral is that, even with a majority of 165, the powers of government are limited. With a smaller but still substantial majority, Wilson discovered this over the reform not only of the Lords but of the trade unions as well. With a large majority likewise, Margaret Thatcher had the same experience over Sunday trading. And when the majority is small or non-existent, as it was with Wilson and James Callaghan in the 1970s or John Major in the 1990s, anything is possible, as appeared during the passage of the Maastricht Bill.

Parliament may be a dispiriting place these days. It is not what it was. It might still be as well to stop parroting endlessly that it counts for nothing and, for a change, to look at what actually happens there.