Let’s have more of this ‘anti-democracy’ from the House of Lords

One could point out that to attack a constitution, there needs to be a constitution to attack; something written down

The House of Lords (Alastair Grant/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Can anyone change? It’s a big and timeless question with which to kick off a small and ephemeral column, but I ask it with the special interest of one whose friends tirelessly badger him to seek psychoanalytical help. And I answer it as one who tirelessly refuses on the grounds that to do so would be to descend into a psychic cesspit from which there would be no escape.

That answer, to quote Hugh Laurie’s gifted diagnostician Dr Gregory House, is that no one changes. No one. You can gain an understanding of your failings, find ways to mask them, learn to modify your behaviour, develop coping mechanisms. None of that is remotely to be sniffed at. But whatever it is you essentially are – whether bred in the bone or instilled in childhood – remains an unalterable essence that cannot for ever be suppressed.

Take Jose Mourinho. On his return to Chelsea last year, he presented himself as a matured Jose who had learned the lessons from his contentious first stint in the Premier League – and changed.

Gone was the screeching sense of entitlement of the two-year-old denied a packet of Skittles in the Tesco sweetie aisle. A humbler, wiser Mourinho had ousted the narcissistic horror of old.

It didn’t take much to blow away that flimsy edifice. A few defeats lured the snarling, paranoiac wolf out from beneath the kindly granny’s bonnet. Soon enough the FA was obliged to ask the Dionne Warwick question – do you know the way to ban Jose? – by charging him with misconduct.

A couple of days after the Portuguese’s latest eruption of raging self-pity at Upton Park came further support from Westminster for the House-Norman counsel of despair. If any major politician in memory seemed to have changed, it was our beloved Chancellor. The catastrophic Budget of 2012 and resulting chorus of boos with which the Olympic Park serenaded George Osborne had given cause for urgent self-administered analysis. Jettisoned was the snootily dismissive Georgie Boy, as once embedded in the public mind by the Bullingdon snap of the white-tied New Romantic with an imperious sneer on his face. In was drafted the cuddlier, wry and witty charmer who, when not enjoying a well-earned break at his grace-and-favour apartment in the colon of Beijing, was on an irresistible march to leadership of party and country whenever David Cameron decides to stand down.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before (the short term memory ain’t all that), but no one changes. If Gordon Brown, the last Chancellor to move next door, taught us one thing, it was that. And so now we find the present Chancellor bleeding from a self-skewering on the sharp end of the defining conceit that drove him to deepen the penury of the working poor by taking his state-shrinking ideologue’s axe to tax credits.

If Tory high command and its fellow travellers in the reactionary press wish to style Monday’s extravaganza in the Lords as “an attack on the constitution” and “a defiance of democracy”, God love ’em to bits for that. One could point out that to attack a constitution, there needs to be a constitution to attack. Something written down on paper, you know, like the one the Americans seem so fond of. Not a series of “conventions” of such arcane daffiness that anyone can interpret them as they choose. And if “democracy” seriously means a government elected by less than a quarter of the electorate (36.9 per cent on a 66 per cent turn out; you do the mathematics) using that non-mandate to do something the PM insisted, in a pre-election Question Time, he wouldn’t do (and then sneakily via Statutory Instrument rather than a proper Commons bill)… Well, if that’s the case, I reckon most of us could handle “democracy” being defied by the ermine-clad a bit more often.

This has nothing to do with an affront to either a phantasmal constitution or what stands proxy in this psychogeriatric of a country for democracy. This is all about Osborne’s translucent disdain for the underprivileged reawakening from the controlled coma in which he placed it; about him reverting to type by trying to shove through a pernicious policy early in one parliament in the faith that its radioactive half-life would be short enough to detoxify it by the time he runs for the premiership in the next.

Who knows if it will cost him the crown. The form book of Tory leadership front runners isn’t encouraging, bringing to mind Crisp leading the 1973 Grand National by a country mile before being nailed by Red Rum near the line.

Clearly he is weakened by the humiliations visited on him by the Lords, and particularly by the scathing critique from Nigel Lawson, who (though he thought the vote beyond the upper house’s remit) warned against this folly just as he once warned Thatcher against the poll tax.

Osborne sycophants – and lovely to hear the mega-egregious Chris Grayling running through his talking points on R4’s Today like a zombie on Largactil – will tell us he’s recovered from a near-death experience before. So he has. But even Lazarus managed it just the once, and what is potentially so damaging to Osborne’s ambition is less the fiasco itself than the ringing reminder it offers of his failings: the cockiness, callousness and malfunctioning political antennae that delivered the omnishambles three years ago. What it tells his MPs and party members, as if it needed telling, is that try as they might, pull the wool over their own and other eyes for a while though they may, no one changes.