Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill (Money) (No. 3)

My hon. Friend has made a good point. I will suggest a possible reason why the Opposition take that view. Despite several attempts, the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) failed to provide any compelling reason why a system that is good enough for the Conservatives to elect their own leader and good enough for hereditary peers to elect hereditary peers in the House of Lords—a system which, incidentally, the Conservative party voted to support just two weeks ago—should be so axiomatically bad for parliamentary elections that the British people must be denied a say in whether they want to elect their Members of Parliament under that system. It is, I am sorry to say, hard to avoid the impression that the Conservatives are operating solely and exclusively in pursuit of what they believe, probably wrongly, to be their partisan self-interest. [Interruption.]