Beyond the party-as-unitary-actor assumption

On 9 November 2005, Tony Blair's government lost two successive votes on its Terrorism Bill. The government's sixty-five-seat majority in the Commons was entirely undercut by the rebellion of forty-nine Labour Members of Parliament who voted with opposition MPs, first to reject the government's recommendation of a ninety-day detention period for terrorist suspects, and then to force on the government an amendment limiting the detention period to twenty-eight days (Cowley and Stuart 2005). Immediately after the defeats, British odds-makers lowered the odds of Blair leaving office before the end of the year from three to one to seven to four (Guardian, 10 November 2005). This was a rare event inasmuch as it was the first government defeat at Westminster in ten years, but it was hardly novel or trend-setting. Blair's predecessor, John Major, had suffered four parliamentary defeats during his term of office, being forced on one occasion to use a confidence motion to force rebellious Eurosceptic Conservative MPs to support the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, the measure the rebels had helped to defeat the previous day.