It was a painful day in the Commons as MPs debated the future of the Lords. It was like watching a cow try to give birth to an elephant and it struck me, as MPs tied themselves in knots, that perhaps they should just give up now. This is the first of three Commons debates on this subject and, without a miracle, things are not going to get better.

Jack Straw is the midwife. I know. God help us all. No wonder the patient is already screaming for pain relief. This is Mr Straw’s birth plan: first, he flatters everyone. Yesterday the compliments flowed like wine at a bacchanalia. Then he deployed a series of facts identified in an obsessively numerical way: he kept referring to paragraph 61, or 262 or whatever. There is a point during a birth when this becomes little irritating.

Actually that point is already with us. Yesterday MPs more or less ignored him to keep returning to discuss what would happen if some part of the Lords is elected. Would the Commons lose its primacy? Underlying every syllable of every word was the fear that, in future, MPs might be less important. This thought is almost unbearable for them. As they agonised, I felt that the only kind thing was to administer an epidural immediately.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who is going to end up in the Lords whatever happens, scolded Mr Midwife. “Aren’t you in danger of treating primacy rather like pregnancy,” he demanded. “Either you have it or you don’t have it?” But surely, he noted, there are degrees of primacy. (I told you the debate was painful.) This excited Mr Straw who, of course, is also going to end up in the Lords. “I DON’T regard primacy as like pregnancy, though it is an elegant metaphor.” Primacy, he noted, is always evolving (although so, of course, is pregnancy, but perhaps not so elegantly as in a metaphor). Mr Straw then started talking about his own life, which he does increasingly these days and is what peers are always doing in the Lords too.

Other MPs jumped up. Almost all of them are going to end up as peers in the current system. A pattern was emerging here. They wrung their hands as they contemplated the bleak and terrible future of an elected Lords. Indeed, it was generally agreed that any such election would be woefully inadequate. The words “banana republic”, dripping with disdain, hovered in the air.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, for it is he, noted that any such election would almost certainly have a low turnout and be done through proportional representation. He shuddered as he noted that people elected in this way might then “claim equivalence of electoral parity with people elected to this place!” The horror of it all was plain to see. Sir Patrick Cormack rolled up to ask what type of person could aspire to such a thing. “If the relationship of that chamber to this was similar to the relationship that currently exists,” he noted, jowls flapping, “we would be unlikely to have men and women of great eminence and quality seeking election to that body.”

Jack Straw must face the truth. If there were ever a case for an emergency Caesarean, this is it.

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