FORGIVE me for returning to the subject once again, but it makes my blood boil and I simply have to get it off my chest.

On Friday last week the House of Lords killed the EU referendum Bill.

Just consider the enormity of what has occurred: a bill passed by the elected representatives of the people has been thrown out by ‘big cheeses’ who have no democratic legitimacy, represent nobody and are not accountable to anyone. An unelected body of grandees has voted to deny ordinary people a vote. It is scarcely credible.

We often smugly criticise the way democracy is traduced in so many other parts of the world.

We need to consider, however, the beam that is in our own eye. Here we are in the 21st century, where our ‘Mother of Parliaments’ has at its core a shocking affront to democracy.

I never used to be an enthusiast for reform of the House of Lords.

Nobody ever troubled me to do anything about it and nobody ever wrote to me or came to my surgeries to demand it. While I would never have designed a legislative body composed in such a way had I started with a blank sheet of paper, it seemed to work well enough.

That was at a time when the House of Lords had the humility to realise that they were a revising chamber: their job was to look in detail at the minutiae of measures in order to improve them and that headline political decisions were the prerogative of the elected Commons.

There were plenty of other things crying out for reform so, as it wasn’t so obviously broken, I didn’t see the need to fix it.

What is demonstrably clear now, however, is that it is most definitely broken. In opposing this measure the Lords have shown themselves to be completely out of touch with ordinary people.

There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that it is the settled will of the British people that they want a referendum on the EU.

I don’t need opinion polls to tell me that, although they do, and by impressive and growing margins, because people stop me in the street and in the supermarket to tell me (often quite forcefully), spontaneously and entirely unprompted that they really want this referendum.

Even those who support our continued membership of the EU, and are enthusiastic about it, acknowledge that they want this referendum.

They realise that the whole project lacks legitimacy: nobody under the age of 56 has ever had an opportunity to vote on the issue. For those who did vote in 1975, the ‘terms of trade’ have changed so dramatically from the question that was originally put to them to decide, that it demands to be revisited.