Quality | 2010.03.09
Will Lord Mandelson remain in ermine for ever?
Any deeply residual hopes Lord Mandelson might have of returning to the Commons appear to have been dashed.
The shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve, has announced that the business secretary must be a victim of the wash-up. In the Commons (and therefore in secret) Grieve announced that the Tories would not allow the constitutional reform and governance bill onto the statute book in the frantic last days of talks before the election – known as the wash-up – if Labour sticks to its plans in the bill to allow peers to resign and then stand as an MP.
Grieve\'s reasoning is that this would turn the Lords into an unacceptable temporary resting place for ambitious politicians.
The reform – to allow peers to become MPs – was an idea that pre-dated Mandelson\'s return to frontline politics as a peer, but the proposal has come to be seen – wrongly – as a purpose-built vehicle for him to shoehorn himself back into the Commons after the election.
The half-belief is that Mandelson still harbours hopes of becoming foreign secretary if Labour is re-elected, something he could probably only do in the Commons. Alternatively, if Labour lost the election, Mandelson could play a bigger role in the election of a new Labour leader from the Commons, it is argued.
No one, incidentally, quite knows how wash-up will work, but it is clear that peers will be able to put individual clauses of bills to a vote in a way in which MPs will not in the Commons. Bills, and individual clauses, are likely to be rejected or accepted in discussions between the frontbenches in the Commons, leaving individual MPs out of the discussions.
Harriet Harman, the equalities minister, believes she will get her groundbreaking equality bill through now without falling victim to wash-up talks.
The big test is whether Gordon Brown can find a way to force through the Lords his planned referendum on the alternative vote for election to the Commons. The aim is to embarrass David Cameron into explaining why he is opposed to a referendum on this issue.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/winto[...]/peter-mandelson-lords-commons
