It will then be up to the joint committee of both Houses, appointed last year, to review the results and attempt to pick up the pieces. Its task is an unenviable one. There can be no possibility of reconciling rival viewpoints so starkly opposed as those represented by the likely choices made by the Upper and Lower Houses.

Theoretically that should put us on the road to a constitutional clash comparable to that in 1911, when the will of the Commons was finally put into effect by the passing of the Parliament Act of that year. If no one believes that anything like this will happen this time round, it is because — pace Robin Cook — all the passion and the heat has gone out of this particular controversy.

Indeed, looking back, one can’t help wondering how the Government allowed things to get this far. We know now, if only because they have said so, that the two key ministers involved (the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor) never cared for the official policy of their party as presented to the voters in two successive election manifestos. Yet that did not stop them from establishing a Royal Commission under Lord Wakeham, then coming up with an official White Paper (in which the elective principle was embraced, if nervously), then finally handing the whole business over to 24 “trusties” drawn in equal strength from each House. In terms of time and energy wasted, it is hard to think of a sadder chapter in the whole history of constitutional reform.

Of course, the Government as a whole is probably relieved. It is almost as if it sensed it had to go through the motions of modernising the most anachronistic part of our legislative system but, having tried and failed to get an agreed solution, it can now sink back into the posture of inertia that has been the pattern for successive governments over the past 90 years. There may still be a little tidying-up work to be done at the edges — the removal, for example, of the 92 hereditary peers who have managed to cling on since their colleagues were booted out in 1999 — but even that can probably wait until after the next election.

For a Government that came to office priding itself on having a mission for constitutional change, it all makes for a melancholy tale. The Blair Government started out, after all, quite sure that it knew best. If Harold Wilson got nowhere in 1968 with his Parliament (No 2) Bill, it was because he made the mistake of trying to do too much, tackling both composition and powers. This time, the Government would take care not to fall into that particular trap. Even John Smith, the former Labour leader, used to talk about “a simple, two-clause Bill” which would remove birth as a qualification for law-making. And that, if through a rather more lengthy measure, was what happened with the Blair Government’s 1999 House of Lords Act.

But, having done the simplest bit (simultaneously selling the pass on the principle, through the compromise worked out between Lord Irvine of Lairg and Viscount Cranborne), the Government’s legislative managers, appeared to have no idea of what to do next. Hence the appointment of Lord Wakeham and his 11 colleagues in 1999, debates in both Houses on the Government’s White Paper proposals in 2000-2001 and finally the summoning of the greybeards to the joint committee in 2002.

If all that was supposed to pave the way for the striking of a final chord of harmony, then one can only say that it is a strategy that has manifestly failed.

THE PERSON I feel sorriest for in contemporary politics is David Triesman, the luckless general secretary of the Labour Party. As if his troubles with the TUC over the Government’s vengeful attitude to the Fire Brigades’ Union were not enough, he now has to reckon with the impact on party membership of any war with Iraq.

The Labour Party is notably coy about the number of members it has, but the last figure I saw was 270,000. My guess is that in 2003 the total will fall well below 250,000.

How distant the days seem when Gordon Brown would announce that he saw no reason why the party should not be able to attract a million members. But that was when Labour was still in Opposition and Brown retained hopes of being its next leader. Maybe party morale would be in a less parlous state if he had fulfilled that ambition.

IT WAS good to see the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, breaking cover last weekend in a newspaper interview. Since Christmas, we seem rather to have lost sight of the new Archbishop — although, as he waits for his enthronement at the end of this month he has, I’m told, been busy enough in and around Lambeth Palace.

In any event, no one should begrudge him a “breather”. The other week I happened to notice the list of the “top ten religious books” in the Church Times. No fewer than six of the ten had been written by one author, Rowan Williams. That struck me as a measure of the weight of expectation that the poor man now carries on his shoulders.