Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

The right hon. Gentleman is of even greater antiquity than me and he will know that there is a great deal of inter-party discussion all the time. For as long as he and I have been in the House, formal negotiations during the wash-up have taken place between the official Opposition and the Government of the day, but there was no suggestion whatsoever that the Liberal Democrats should be excluded from that process, and I do not believe that the conclusion would have been any different. We will come in due course to the removal of clauses in part 3 relating to a referendum on the voting system, and of clause 53 relating to the ending of by-elections for hereditary peers. We were in exactly the same place as the Liberal Democrats, but the official Opposition were not. The simple truth, which would have been the case had all three parties been formally in the room, is that during the wash-up, the Opposition have a veto. That is always the case—I was party to wash-ups when in opposition. It is straightforward. That is the reality and there is nothing one can do about it. The choice we faced, which would have been the same for the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) had he been in my seat, was that we should not make the best the enemy of the good. We would not have got any part of the Bill through had we not been able to reach an accommodation, and, because of external realities, I do not believe that the result would have been any different had there been earlier discussions. As hon. Members will know, we offered the Conservatives what I thought was a good way of squaring the circle in their opposition to the alternative vote and to Liberal Democrat and Government support for it. We said that we would introduce measures and were ready to table amendments that would subject that part of the Bill to an automatic sunset clause. The clause would have stayed on the statute book and, if within six months the Government of the day had taken no action, it would have fallen. If the Government had introduced affirmative resolutions in each House, the legislation would have come into force. We offered that to the Conservative party, but it decided for its own reasons that that was unacceptable.