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warning – if he had lost the vote authorizing action his position would obviously have been untenable – but since then he had made a veiled reference to his ‘ultimate weapon’ when trying to stave off a rebellion over foundation hospitals (Cowley, 2005, 196–7, 162). Back in 1976, Harold Wilson had written that a Prime Minister who tried ‘to bring his colleagues to heel by the unilateral threat of a dissolution … would be certifiable’ (Wilson, 1976, 40). Whether or not that word was appropriate in Blair’s case, his tactics were certainly reminiscent of the Cold War notion of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – and invited backbenchers to call his bluff. Usually (as in the case of top-up fees) Blair’s confrontational approach was the prelude to a compromise, with rebels winning significant concessions and the Prime Minister staying in office. However, such episodes could only strengthen the feeling that the executive and the legislature were now embroiled in an endemic constitutional struggle, underlying and reinforcing battles over specific policies. This change in Britain’s political culture would not be helpful to any successor who lacked Blair’s elephantine majority – or, more importantly, the enduring personal prestige arising from his record as an election winner.

The experience of Gordon Brown is particularly instructive in this respect. Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart have charted more than 200 backbench rebellions of varying significance while Brown was Prime Minister, including one which took place less than an hour after he had formally taken office (Cowley and Stuart, 2014, 5). Yet Brown had given every indication that he had learned from the bruising Blair experience, and put forward several proposals to address parliamentary grievances. Whatever his intentions, Brown was soon sidetracked by the first signs of a global banking crisis. In fact, if he had seriously sought a more amicable relationship between the executive and the legislature, he had created a formidable obstacle himself, by announcing in his final budget as Chancellor (March 2007) that the lower (10p) rate of income tax would be abolished from April 2008. In the weeks before that measure was due to take effect, Labour backbenchers launched a concerted campaign to force either a policy reversal, or other concessions which would ensure that no one would be worse off as a result of the change. Faced with the possibility of a catastrophic defeat on a Finance Bill the new Chancellor, Alistair Darling, made a timely commitment to allocate extra money to disadvantaged groups (Cowley and Stuart, 2014, 13–16). The impression that this was a government characterized by genuine errors of judgement rather than a Blairite mission to make enemies is reinforced by its defeat in April 2009 on an Opposition Day motion calling for improved settlement rights for retired Gurkha soldiers. Losing the vote was damaging enough, but the government also suffered a public relations disaster, since the Opposition had been invigorated by the indefatigable campaigning of the actress Joanna Lumley, who was far more popular than any current member of the House of Commons.

      Against this background, it was difficult to predict the likely effect of the parliamentary expenses scandal which dominated media coverage of politics for several weeks in 2009. On balance, though, the idea that MPs were greedy as well as ineffectual could be taken as a challenge to prove their value, especially in causes which enjoyed considerable public support. It was not, in short, likely to abate the tendency towards conflict between the Prime Minister and Parliament. This was an unpromising context for the creation of Britain’s first peacetime coalition since 1945, as the very fact of joining forces with a political foe was sure to put some strain on Conservative and Liberal Democrat party loyalties during the 2010–15 Parliament. In addition, the coalition was committed to a controversial economic strategy – ‘austerity’ – which the Liberal Democrats had opposed until David Cameron invited them to help form a government.

      However, the period of coalition government is more noteworthy for the instances of conflict within rather than between the partners. Perhaps the most curious incident was a vote on an increase in the upper limit on higher education tuition fees (9 December 2010), when the Liberal Democrats divided three ways. The largest number (twentyeight) voted in favour; twenty-one voted against, and eight abstained. In practice the twenty-one ‘rebels’ were showing their opposition to the leadership by voting in favour of a position which had been a prominent manifesto commitment less than six months earlier. On this occasion, the junior partner in the coalition was issuing its MPs with the most direct of provocations – almost tantamount to a slap in the face – and the relatively low level of outright dissent is surprising. Not to be outdone, the Conservative leadership incited rebellion in its own parliamentary ranks by introducing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. On the second reading (5 February 2013), 137 Conservative MPs voted against the measure; 127 supported it. Although this was technically a free vote, Cameron had been a vocal champion of the reform.

By this time, Cameron might have been looking for issues on which he could take a distinctive initiative, because in other respects his agenda was being undermined by unruly MPs on his own side. Anticipating trouble ahead, one of Cameron’s first actions as Prime Minister was to propose changes in the procedures of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, allowing frontbenchers to retain full membership (including voting rights) when the party was in office. This attempt to stifle dissent was carried in a vote of the Committee, but more than a hundred MPs had opposed it, so Cameron thought it prudent to back down (Cameron, 2019, 239).

      In October 2011, eighty-one Conservatives defied a three-line whip to support a motion which called for a referendum on EU membership. A year later, the government was defeated when fifty-three Conservative MPs voted in favour of a cut in the EU budget, rather than the inflation-linked increase which Cameron had suggested. Although the vote was not binding on the government, Conservative Eurosceptics let it be known that they would turn out in even greater numbers if Cameron accepted a budget increase of any kind. This was the type of rebellion – a rejection of a position on Europe which was itself designed to mollify Eurosceptics – which had made Major’s life such a misery. In January 2013 Cameron capitulated, offering an in/out referendum on EU membership after the next general election. However, having scented blood Tory rebels wanted to start feasting without delay; on 15 May more than a hundred voted to express ‘regret’ that the Queen’s Speech had not included a government bill paving the way for the referendum.

      The most dramatic government defeat occurred on 29 August 2013, on a motion which threatened (but, after a government concession, did not itself authorize) military action against the Syrian Assad regime. The government, which had recalled Parliament in the hope of winning approval for action, lost the vote by 285 to 272. Thirty-nine coalition MPs – thirty Tories and nine Liberal Democrats – joined Labour in opposing the motion. It was an excellent illustration of the executive/legislature split, since many MPs were clearly actuated by memories of Blair’s dubious presentation of the case for action in Iraq in 2003.

Whatever its record in other respects, the Cameron coalition was a golden era for connoisseurs of parliamentary rebellions, which took place over a remarkable range of issues and varied widely in their causes and scale. Apart from dissent within Conservative and Liberal Democrat ranks, there was a significant spat which might have caused terminal damage if Cameron and his Liberal Democrat deputy Nick Clegg had not been fairly laid-back characters who were disinclined to nurse grievances. Again, the trouble arose from the aggression of Conservative backbenchers. On 10 July 2012, ninety-one MPs voted against the second reading of a bill which would have begun a gradual process of House of Lords reform, leading to a mainly elected upper chamber. Although the government won the vote, it was clear that there was sufficient opposition in the Commons to prevent further progress on an issue which had been debated many times and had always seemed likely to end in a compromise. The government decided to withdraw the legislation rather than encounter embarrassing delays and defeats. In retaliation, on 29 January 2013 the Liberal Democrats blocked the implementation of constituency boundary changes which were likely to benefit the Conservatives (partly at the expense of the Lib Dems).

      As it turned out, in the 2015 general election the Conservatives were able to pick up plenty of Liberal Democrat seats without the help of boundary changes. The result, for David Cameron, was a blend of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘twin imposters’; he could take personal satisfaction from the fact that his party had increased its popular vote and secured an overall majority despite its imposition of economic austerity, but the margin (just twelve seats) left him even more vulnerable to pressure from his own backbenchers.

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