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commentators. As we have seen, the select few who reach the summit of their political ambitions by ‘kissing hands’ with the monarch and taking on the role of Prime Minister will find it very difficult to retain their old impressions of the humble parliamentary foot soldiers they have left behind. Even a Prime Minister who originally entered Parliament with limited ambitions – a hypothetical case in the period under review, although John Major might be regarded as a reasonable approximation – will tend to assume that, given the right inducements, a sufficient proportion of the flock can be guided back into the party fold. Ultimately, this thought process is underpinned by the belief that a governing party which indulges in public disagreements is likely to lose the next general election. The prospect of a spell in Opposition is deemed to be an adequate deterrent to all backbenchers: those who seek ministerial office will have to recalculate their planned ascent, those who have abandoned their ambitions will no longer be able to find consolation as awkward players in a winning team, while the MPs who never wanted more than to serve their constituents will become impotent onlookers as their opponents implement distasteful policies. Even worse, MPs who allow their party to fight an election in a state of disunity might lose their own seats.

When evaluating the true significance of parliamentary rebellions, it is necessary to take account of the subjects of the votes as well as the scale of non-compliance. Necessarily, contextual factors are impressionistic, whereas votes against a government measure can be counted. However, when contextual factors are taken into account the rebellious propensities of Labour MPs between 2001 and 2005 seem much less impressive than the bare statistics would suggest. Although Thatcher did encounter resistance from ‘One Nation’ Conservatives – and indeed in April 1986 her government was thwarted by MPs from all wings of the party in its attempt to relax the laws on Sunday trading – her internal critics were effectively hamstrung by the party’s refrain that it had always been on the side of ‘free enterprise’, even during the years when it had accepted the broad outlines of the post-war settlement introduced by Clement Attlee’s Labour governments (1945–51). In other words, Thatcher could be seen as a more radical exemplar of a well-worn Conservative theme, and one which had always played very well among grassroots members. For its part, in Opposition after 1979 Labour had accepted many of Thatcher’s reforms by gradual steps; but when the party won its landslide majority of 1997 there was a widespread expectation (among the general public, as well as MPs and party members) of at least a modest reaction against ‘Thatcherism’. Even Blair’s post-election pledge that ‘We have been elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour’ was taken with a pinch of salt; after all, at the beginning of her premiership Thatcher had proposed that ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’, and even her most ardent admirers would have to admit that these reassuring sentiments were rarely reflected in her subsequent decisions.

      From this perspective, whereas Thatcher’s most controversial policies were almost invariably attuned to ‘core’ Conservative voters, many of New Labour’s measures represented a direct challenge to the party’s grassroots members and MPs who had embarked on political careers in order to preserve (or extend) the Attlee Governments’ reforms. The first Blair Government (1997–2001) flew an early quasi-Thatcherite kite by asking MPs to vote for a welfare reform – restricting the benefits available to lone parents – which would not have won support from any Labour member if it had been proposed by a Conservative. As such, the tally of Labour rebels – just forty-seven, plus around twenty abstentions in the vote of 11 December 1997 – was remarkably modest. The impression that the episode had been engineered by the government to smoke out and punish potential troublemakers at an early stage was reinforced by media reports that, although the government easily won the vote, the rebels would be subjected to sanctions of various kinds.

In other words, it could be argued that the most significant rebellions on domestic matters during the Blair years were provoked by a government which was working on the assumption that most of its MPs would swallow almost anything which was proposed by the first Labour government in eighteen years. This marked a sharp contrast to the best-remembered parliamentary confrontations during the premiership of John Major, when Tory MPs were the aggressors, even when the government had already met them more than halfway. In fact, shortly after the government’s re-election with a reduced majority in April 1992 there had been a departure from this pattern whose significance has been obscured by the vivid memory of the Maastricht debates.

      In October 1992 British Coal announced a programme to close thirty-one out of fifty deep mines, leading to the loss of 30,000 jobs. The President of the Board of Trade, Michael Heseltine, promptly unveiled a generous package of redundancy payments and retraining programmes. Although the closures were explained on grounds which the government had used during the 1984–5 miners’ strike – namely that the pits were ‘uneconomical’ – they were denounced by church leaders and Conservative MPs as well as Opposition politicians and trade unionists. Backbenchers on the government side were particularly outraged because the cuts would affect many of the workers who had refused to join the 1984–5 strike. Thus Tory MPs who were already feeling guilty because of the fall of Margaret Thatcher were now being asked to approve a measure which would threaten the livelihoods of people who had played an heroic part in the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Short of targeting Falklands veterans, the government could not have found a more effective way of alienating its core supporters. The announcement was even less comprehensible because it came just a few weeks after the humiliation of ‘Black Wednesday’ (16 September 1992), when Britain was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS); indeed, the plans had been leaked to the press just two days after that traumatic episode. The government was under attack for its economic management even before that fatal blow to its reputation for competence. Faced with the certainty of defeat over the pit closures, Heseltine cobbled together a package of concessions and was able to win approval for a revised programme once the initial outcry had faded (James, 1997, 186–94).

In his memoirs, John Major claimed that although he had been consulted over the closures and had to accept ‘ultimate responsibility’, he knew by ‘instinct’ that the announcement would be ‘an absolute political disaster’ (Major, 1999, 670). This does not accord with Heseltine’s own account, which describes a meeting chaired by Major in the autumn of 1992; at that time, the general view was that the closures ‘would not prove that difficult to handle’ (Heseltine, 2000, 437). This assumption could only have been based on the experience of the Thatcher years, when the government made numerous grim announcements without suffering sizeable parliamentary rebellions. Yet although the Major Government could claim to have won a clear ‘mandate’ at the 1992 general election, its overall majority of just twenty-one seats left it vulnerable to just a handful of determined malcontents. The obvious lesson, even before the ERM fiasco, was that the government should consult carefully with potential rebels before taking any controversial decisions. Its failure to do so on this incendiary issue, in those circumstances, meant that for the first time in living memory Conservative rebels who forced a government climbdown were likely to be praised rather than pilloried in the right-wing press. The lesson that there are worse things in politics than a reputation for disunity was not lost on Labour MPs, especially since the fate of the coal mines was particularly important to them.

During the Blair years the parliamentary arithmetic was of a kind which made it difficult for the most maladroit government to bring about its own downfall. As we have seen, however, Blair and his colleagues did not fail for want of trying, starting with the deliberate provocation of the 1997 welfare reforms. After Maastricht, Major had effectively surrendered to his Eurosceptic tormentors. At times it seemed as if Blair’s main purpose was to demonstrate that there were no circumstances which could make him equally impotent. Parliament, and the Labour Party in particular, had to be reminded of who was master. As Major had shown, the Prime Minister’s ultimate weapon in any serious trial of strength was the threat of dissolving Parliament. Ideally, recalcitrant MPs would be brought back into line by the merest hint that the Prime Minister might make a particular vote into an issue of confidence in the government. Blair’s mismanagement of his majority is illustrated by his tendency to make this threat explicit. Thus, for example, at a press conference in December 2003 he staked his personal authority on the passage of legislation which would introduce ‘top-up’

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