Honours backlash – but will it matter to Lords votes?

There was a bit of a backlash amongst Tory peers when they got wind that David Cameron was sending them quite so many still active advisers who work in or closely with No. 10 (Kate Fall, Stephen Gilbert, Simone Finn).

The Dissolution Honours is traditionally a list for saying thank you to people no longer in service not for putting working advisers into the Lords.

I’m told that David Cameron made the argument behind the scenes that the Tory peers were crying out for Conservatives who would turn up in the Lords to vote and not just enjoy the front-loading title for cheque books and upgrades. So, the argument went, here are a few people who work in Westminster so will be in the right postcode to get to any tight votes.

The truth is that even with the lift that David Cameron has given Tory numbers today (26 new Conservatives) he’s also allowed 19 to Labour and the Lib Dems.

When votes in the Lords are heavily whipped – the sort of votes when peers bump into each other with surprise saying “I thought I’d been to your memorial” – the government tends to lose by about 60 to 70. The crossbenchers often divide evenly. So David Cameron’s efforts today won’t get him very far but this could be the beginning of adding to Tory numbers in this Parliament not the end.

The Lib Dems insist they are perfectly entitled to the extra peers they’ve got because a Dissolution honours looks backwards to the last Parliament doesn’t have to reflect the last election (the latter was the position the Libs signed up to in the Coalition Agreement of 2010). Critics of the Lib Dems say the Party should actually be subject to “claw-back” in the Lords after its performance in the 2015 general election.

The Lib Dems lost out on at least one would-be peer, David Laws, rejected by the Lords Appointments Committee. It’s rumoured 5 or 6 Tories were knocked back and in the past this has often been because of the way they arrange their tax affairs.

I bumped into Jeremy Corbyn this afternoon and asked about his position on the Lords. I thought I caught a whiff of something closer to “old politics” than the much vaunted “new politics” in his reply. Three times I asked him if he would promise not to appoint any Labour peers and three times he said “I see no need to.” Not exactly an emphatic pledge.