Should all lobbying of ministers, aides and senior officials be publicly declared?

What's striking is how little appetite there was, outside the youngest cohort, to defend the status quo of WhatsApp deals and conference-hall corridors: this chamber backed a full lobbying register by roughly three to one, a rout rather than a debate.

The fracture, such as it was, ran along generational and gender lines rather than any obvious ideological one. The 16-24s split evenly, the only group not persuaded, while every voter over 45 who took part backed disclosure, and men were considerably more convinced than women, who divided down the middle.

The vote echoes a familiar post-Westminster mood: after a string of access scandals and a watchdog report finding the current register catches barely a sliver of real lobbying, transparency reads here as a bare minimum rather than a reform to be argued over.

If ministers were hoping this looked like a contested question, the chamber declined to oblige.