The sound of UK government ministers complaining that they cannot get their way, and of the outrage of the government-supporting press, is one of a working constitution.

The recent decision by John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, to allow a vote on an amendment on a government business motion has prompted Tory unhappiness and screaming front page headlines in the rightwing press. Even on its own merits, the subject is arcane. One suspects that few of those supposedly upset by this development knew or cared whether such votes were possible before a few days ago.

In fact, there is little to be genuinely concerned about in what happened. All the Speaker did was to allow MPs to vote on how the business of the House should be conducted. The government’s real problem is not that the vote took place, but that it no longer has a working majority on Brexit issues. And the outcome of the vote was sensible: it obliges the government to act swiftly if, as is expected, it loses the “meaningful” vote next week on accepting the Brexit withdrawal agreement. Only a knavish or foolish partisan could be vexed by this.

The artificial nature of this uproar is underlined by the fact that there have been many constitutional trespasses over the past three or so years, almost all of which have received little more than a shrug from government-supporting MPs and pundits.

Theresa May’s government prolonged the current parliamentary session over two years, so that there would not be a Queen’s Speech on which they could lose a vote. The government packed the standing committees (which scrutinise legislation) with Conservative majorities by procedural sleight of hand, despite there being a hung parliament. A secretary of state repeatedly misled the House and its committees over the extent and existence of Brexit sector analyses reports. The government deliberately broke the Commons’ “pairing” convention when an opposition MP was on maternity leave so that the government could win a vote.

And there are more. The government repeatedly ignored and does not even participate in votes on opposition motions. The government committed itself to billions of pounds of public expenditure in a blatant bribe to the Democratic Unionist party for support in a supply and confidence arrangement. The government repeatedly seeks to circumvent or abuse the Sewell convention in its dealings with the devolved administrations. The government seeks to legislate for staggeringly wider “Henry VIII powers” so that it can legislate and even repeal Acts without any recourse to parliament.

The government even sought to make the Article 50 notification without any parliamentary approval and forced the litigation to go all the way to the Supreme Court (where it lost). The government employed three QCs to oppose the litigation on whether Article 50 could be revoked unilaterally (which it also lost).

There are even more serious examples. This government became the first administration in parliamentary history to be held to be in contempt of parliament. This government even stood by as there were nasty and unfair public attacks on the independent judiciary and the independent civil service.

Each of these were instances of a government wanting to get its way. But a constitution is not there to make it easy for the executive to do as it wishes. Instead, a constitution should provide checks and balances so that no one element of the state has absolute power.

Mr Bercow did more in allowing that vote to “bring back control” than any single leave-supporting MP has done since the referendum. The popular press should be celebrating that an over-mighty executive was halted and that the people’s representatives got to have their say. But so government-minded have many commentators and politicians become that it seems to them like constitutional carnage when the government hears “no”. They should have been more worried by the possibility that parliament would not have prevailed.

The writer is a contributing editor of the Financial Times

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