I don't think a lot happened in the Lords last week, and anyway I had to take a week off.

I've got to the age where the NHS discovers more things going wrong by the year, and hands out more and more pills to keep us going.

But the problem with new pills is that sometimes they seem to do more harm than good and for half last week the ones I started taking last weekend knocked me out flat.

I'm not suggesting that my absence from the Lords had much to do with ‘not much going on’, though one government minister recently told me I was the biggest nuisance in the House. I told him that was the biggest compliment I’d had for ages.

But I didn’t have a lot to do with the big upset the previous week when the biggest Labour rebellion yet combined with a solid turnout of Liberal Demo-crats to beat the government by 107 to 85 during the Report stage of the Political Parties and Elections Bill.

What we passed was Gordon Prentice’s amendment to ban tax exiles from donating to political parties. Gordon Prentice, you ask? Surely he's the MP for Pendle who sits in the Commons, not in the Lords.

That's true, of course, though he did come to the Bar of the House to listen to much of the debate.

The peer who moved the Prentice amendment was Lord Campbell-Savours, the former MP for Workington and back in the 1970s the Labour candidate for Darwen.

It had been tabled in the Commons by Mr Prentice, but neither debated nor voted on. They'll have to do so now, thanks to their Lordships, and there are rumours the Government is going to concede the point.

Unlike in the Grand Committee on the Bill, no-one mentioned Pendle by name nor the noble Lord, Conservative Lord Ashcroft, though everyone knew what it was all about.

No-one really knows if Lord Ashcroft is a tax exile, because he won't say where he pays his taxes. But he gives lots of dosh to the Tories and he runs their target seats operation. And one seat where they are visibly pouring in cash is Pendle. Perhaps Mr Prentice will start to love the Lords after all!