To report politics, you have to know how to count

There was a last-minute scramble on Thursday night to try to find out which cabinet ministers had voted against Theresa May

Lyndon B Johnson never said that the most important thing in politics was to know how to count, but if he had he would have been talking about psychology, not arithmetic. As one of America’s supreme political operators, he knew that every member of congress had a price – often literally – and he was good at persuading people. More importantly, he was good at judging whether they had genuinely been persuaded.

That is one of the hardest parts of reporting parliament. Sometimes – and this week was one of those times – it is hard to predict how MPs will vote, and quite hard to explain what they did after they’ve done it.

On Thursday night, in particular, there were two extraordinary votes. First, Hilary Benn, the Labour chair of the Brexit select committee, lost his amendment by just two votes. That was the narrowest margin I have ever seen. I had to look up when the last tied vote was (it was 1980: a vote on televising the Commons, which as a result didn’t happen until 1989 – there was also one in 1993 on the Maastricht Treaty, but that turned out to be an error; the government had actually won by one vote).

Then there was the final vote on Thursday on whether to ask the EU for an extension to the Brexit timetable. Only that morning, Theresa May had been forced to allow her ministers a free vote, which meant Westminster journalists were suddenly having to explain why Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary, had voted against a motion he had just “commended” to the House.

This was unexpected. Free votes are most often used for issues of conscience, such as abortion, on which in the past parties tended not to lay down a policy line. Sometimes they are used to get out of a political hole. Ted Heath held one at the start of the process of taking the UK into the European Economic Community in 1971 – although he was trying to make it easier for Labour MPs to vote with him.

Thursday’s free vote was also unexpected because most journalists (including me) expected Benn’s amendment to pass. That amendment would have taken control over what to do next away from the government.

If it had passed, there would have been no free vote, because that would have settled the question.

So, instead of writing what we expected to write – “parliament votes to take control of Brexit” – we were scrabbling around trying to find out which cabinet ministers had voted against the prime minister.

And even that was hard to count, because Alun Cairns, the Welsh secretary, voted for and against the motion (an antique way of recording an abstention), while Andrea Leadsom and Liz Truss attend cabinet meetings but are not strictly cabinet ministers. So the answer was five: Stephen Barclay, Liam Fox, Chris Grayling, Penny Mordaunt and Gavin Williamson.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator