article: After their defiance of the government on Monday, peers are waiting to see what instrument the government will devise for their punishment. And in particular they're keen to guess whether their former leader, Lord Strathclyde, will place a silken noose about their noble necks, or merely slap their noble wrists. Conservative MPs are not amused about Monday's rebuff: "they've got to bleed," growled one senior Tory backbencher, but the options for punishment are far from simple. Despite the chuntering from sources close to ministers about "suspending" the Lords, or otherwise clipping its wings, such extreme constitutional surgery is simply not in the gift of the government. Serious constitutional reform requires passing a bill, and the investment of time and political capital necessary may simply be too great to be worth the bother. The basic problem is that any measure to cut the powers of the Lords has to be approved by, er, the House of Lords. And should peers reject the proposals, the Government could only over-ride them through the cumbersome means of the Parliament Act. Thus the same Lords reform bill would have to be passed by MPs two years running, to become law. There is no real consensus in the Commons about how to reform the Upper House and that would become painfully clear, whatever scheme was laid before it. By immemorial convention, constitutional measures are debated in detail by a committee of the whole House, and to bring the Parliament Act into play, that process would have to be gone through twice. That means two years in which, potentially, weeks of Commons time was devoted to debating constitutional arcana. "Oh but it can be kept manageable by timetabling the committee stage." Really? Without that elusive consensus about the shape of Lords reform, there's a good chance that, for any given reform proposal, enough Conservative MPs would oppose a timetable motion, allowing it to be defeated and tipping the government into the prospect of an open-ended committee stage, lasting for months, not weeks. It was this that caused the Coalition to abandon the Clegg Lords Reform Bill, and it could well happen again. Labour played Clegg pretty mercilessly and seem unlikely to be more sympathetic to any Conservative proposal. No Labour government has ever had a majority in the Lords, and their MPs think the government should suck these defeats up, just as Tony Blair and his predecessors had to. And let's not even think about the consequences for government legislation if peers were really riled. So, if a Lords reform bill of some kind is a politically expensive and difficult exercise, what about creating a new wave of Tory peers to swamp the opposition parties? That would mean more than a hundred. Again, that is difficult, for different reasons. For a start the government has created a lot of new Tory peers already, new noble Lords are being introduced to the House at the rate of four or so a week, there are four more due next week. And it's not a done deal that the Queen would simply
summary: As every viewer of the Alec Guiness comedy classic, Kind Hearts and Coronets, knows, when peers are hanged, the execution is performed with a silken cord.