Charles Moore:

Theresa May must face down arrogant Remainers in the Lords or she will break her promise to voters

Last Monday, Viscount Hailsham moved Amendment 49 to the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, in the House of Lords. I realise there can be few less enticing ways of starting a newspaper column, so please let me explain.

First, a word about Lord Hailsham himself. Even the invariably well-informed readers of The Daily Telegraph may struggle to call to mind exactly who he is. I can assist by deploying the words “Douglas Hogg” and “moat”. As Mr Hogg, the future viscount was an MP. In claiming his parliamentary expenses, according to the Telegraph investigation at the time, he pleaded costs of “around £2,000” for the cleaning of his moat in Lincolnshire. This made him famous.

Mr Hogg reacted angrily, saying that he submitted his moat expenses only to show the parliamentary authorities the pitiless price of maintaining his lovely house and to argue that they should pay him a proportion of the total, rather than quibbling over each bit. Other costs itemised included piano-tuning, bee removal, having his stable lights fixed and the services of a mole-catcher. This sad affair put paid to his political career in the Commons.

But Mr Hogg is also, through heredity, Viscount Hailsham. So he stood, more than once, in the strange little by-elections that occur in the Lords when one of the 92 hereditary peers who still sit in the chamber dies. Lord H’s Conservative colleagues obstinately refused to elect him. Undaunted, he kept pointing out that former Cabinet members normally get peerages and that – lest we forget – he sat in the Cabinet as minister of agriculture for two years in the Nineties. (Colleagues called this “Hogg-whimpering”.) Eventually, an exhausted David Cameron gave in and made him a life peer in 2015.

Lord Hailsham constantly proclaims his devotion to Parliament. As he put it himself on Monday, he is one of “the heirs of a very long and noble tradition”. If tenacity in securing for himself the privileges of both Houses is proof of this, there have been few greater parliamentarians than the third Viscount Hailsham.

So there Lord Hailsham stood, telling peers about his amendment. The EU referendum vote two years ago was only, he said, “an interim decision”. He made no mention of Parliament’s intention, declared when it enacted the referendum, to implement the result, nor of the fact that Parliament triggered Article 50 to leave, nor that the Bill he was trying to amend is Parliament’s legislation for withdrawal. He is proposing something else. He wants Parliament to improve upon the decision of the people and, if so inclined, to reverse it.

The Hailsham clause insists that Parliament must vote on the draft of any agreement between Britain and the EU, probably before that agreement is final. It empowers Parliament, if unhappy, to force Mrs May back to Brussels to start again, under its instructions. Thus Parliament would become, for the first time ever, a proxy negotiator rather than a legislator. Reverting to powers for the unelected Chamber not seen since the Edwardian era, the amendment also gives the Lords a seeming veto over any withdrawal agreement. It is designed to remove completely the option of “no deal”. The Prime Minister would then have no bottom line against Brussels.

The House of Lords passed the Hailsham amendment – and eight others with a similar lack of relevance to the actual Bill, which is about withdrawal, not the negotiations. These include forcing Britain to stay in the customs union, and a proposal, moved by Lord Patten of Barnes (that’s the podgy one who was chairman of the BBC until the Jimmy Savile fiasco, not the one with the bouffant hair who used to be education secretary) about the Northern Ireland border.

Lord Patten (who is in receipt of an EU pension) made an amazing terror threat. His speech suggested that to install so much as one security camera checking the movement of goods from South to North would be like carrying “a can of petrol in one hand and a box of matches in the other”. His amendment requires that any change in our Northern Irish border arrangements must have the approval of the Irish Republic, thus making it potentially impossible for the UK to leave the EU in one piece. The Lords merrily passed it. All the amendments were helped on their way by the feebleness of the Government’s business managers and whips.

This coming Tuesday, yet another amendment comes before the Lords. This would remove from the Bill the date of our departure from the EU (March 29 2019). Probably we would not leave at all.

This Peers vs the People power-grab confirms, almost beyond caricature, the thesis that helped Brexit win – that the EU is a project belonging to an arrogant elite. As well as the Remainer swells like Lord P, many of the most active campaigners in the Lords are former mandarins – Cabinet secretaries, permanent secretaries, ambassadors, European commissioners. With their legendary dexterity in drafting, and a gift for the reversal of meaning that would make even George Orwell’s satire redundant, they produced all these amendments in the name of upholding parliamentary sovereignty. The effect – fully intended – would be to make sure that, even though 17.4 million people voted to do so, we would never get that sovereignty back.

Thank goodness Lords H and P, and all these Sir Humphreys who are now Lord Humphreys, have not yet succeeded in wresting our constitution back to its pre-1911 condition in which the Lords could defeat the Commons. So the question is: “What will now happen there?”

The amendments in the Upper House have been carefully worked out with Remainer Tory rebels in the Lower one, especially those with high-level legal experience. Their expressed solicitude for Parliament makes it easier for Labour peers and MPS worried about displeasing pro-brexit voters to support them. The amendments can now be “weaponised” in the Commons by those few (but possibly not few enough) Conservative MPS determined to reverse the referendum, defy their party’s manifesto commitment last year and ignore the evidence – firmly on display in yesterday’s local election results – that the Tories win only if voters believe that Brexit will happen.

Here, I think, Mrs May’s advisers misunderstand the situation. The current line of the whips is that “each extreme” of the Conservative Party should now give a bit to keep the show on the road. This is a false equivalence. The pro-brexit “extreme” are MPS who want to implement the referendum result and support the manifesto policy of leaving the customs union. The anti-brexit extreme (no inverted commas required here) wants to discard what the people voted for. You cannot split the difference: it is the difference between keeping your promises and breaking them. The Government has to take the risks required to implement its own policy.

In this week’s meeting of the Brexit “War Cabinet”, Mrs May was outgunned on her “customs partnership” compromise, thanks to the influence of the younger, rising ministers, Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, and Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary. Both voted Remain, but both understand that, if the Government fails to accomplish Brexit, voters will see that it stands for nothing and it will therefore fall. Does Mrs May see that, too?