Protesters demonstrate against the religious hatred bill. Photograph: Sang Tan/AP
Contrary to all the mythology about the dark arts of the whips, the most important role of the whips office is not to bully and intimidate the government's critics, but to marshal enough willing supporters of the government to ensure that it wins each vote - and last night, they didn't do that, writes Philip Cowley. Whereas the two defeats over the terrorism bill in November could not fairly be blamed on the whips office - the whips had then been warning consistently that they didn't have the level of support to ensure victory over the government's 90-day detention proposal - there is no such excuse for last night's defeats. The division lists record 26 Labour MPs voting against the government in the first vote, and 21 in the second. A government with a majority of 65 should be able to brush rebellions like that aside. November's defeats were a failure of political leadership. January's were a failure of whipping.
The embarrassment was made all the worse by the fact that the prime minister was present for the first vote, but was then allowed to leave the Commons before the second, presumably because people assumed the second vote was a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, it wasn't - being lost by a majority of just one - and the prime minister's vote would have been the difference between a draw (with the deputy speaker then siding with the government) or defeat. Add to that, the fact that George Galloway - recently much criticised for his poor voting record - voted for the government in both votes, and the embarrassment just intensifies.
Fingers are already being pointed at the chief whip, Hilary Armstrong - and if anyone takes the flak for the debacle it'll be her. It won't necessarily have been her that was responsible for any decisions about allowing MPs to have been absent from the Commons (that would have been the pairing whip, Tommy McAvoy) or the calculations of the numbers (much more likely to have been the deputy chief whip, Bob Ainsworth). But this was a collective failure by the whips office, and the buck stops at the top.
Some of this morning's coverage has described these as the second and third defeats on whipped votes suffered by the Blair government, conflating the two defeats over the terrorism bill. The reality is that these are the third and fourth defeats. And consider this: in the five years between 1992 and 1997 John Major suffered four defeats on whipped votes as a result of dissent. Despite a majority more than three times as large, the third Blair term has now seen the same number of defeats in just nine months.
Philip Cowley is reader in parliamentary government at the university of Nottingham and author of The Rebels: How Blair Mislaid His Majority.
