So, on Friday, 236 Labour MPs voted for Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of the Labour Government to assume responsibility for Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill, and for the increasingly bitter Red-on-Red warfare of the last eight weeks to continue for at least another five months.

Because, as the Cabinet Office Guide to Making Legislation makes clear (in paragraphs 45.24-26), by adopting a neutral position on a Private Members’ Bill (PMB), the Government has nevertheless indicated that it is “prepared to accept [the PMB] reaching the statute book with all of the consequences”, and “the Government has a duty of care to the statute book”. In short, from now on it is up to the Government, not Kim Leadbeater and her supporters, to avoid the risk of which I warned in October: a lack of proper scrutiny leading to the statute book, and the public, being lumbered with legislation that – come implementation – turns out to be a pile of pants.

This means the easy ride that Kim Leadbeater and her supporters have enjoyed to date is at an end. Perhaps most significantly, the Government will surely now have to publish the impact assessment, explanatory notes, legal issues memorandum and delegated powers memorandum that – if it has been following the Guide to Making Legislation – it submitted to the Parliamentary Business and Legislation (PBL) Committee of the Cabinet in late October (see paragraph 45.25).

While the time gap between Leadbeater publishing her PMB (on 11 November) and the Bill’s Second Reading was no shorter than it is with many government Bills, public and parliamentary scrutiny of the Bill’s provisions prior to Friday’s debate was seriously hampered by the lack of such documents, and in particular the lack of an impact assessment showing the likely impact on and associated financial cost (or otherwise) to the NHS and the justice system.

So, for example, when the former President of the Family Division of the High Court, Sir James Munby, included in his detailed demolition of the PMB’s proposed safeguards a simple calculation – based on Kim Leadbeater’s own figures – showing they could consume the entire current capacity of the High Court Family Division, there was no answer from Leadbeater and supporters such as Lord Falconer to Sir James’s straightforward questions:

Where are the judges to be found? And what of the impact on the wider administration of justice which, as is unhappily notorious, is already under enormous strain?

On social media and by email, I repeatedly asked Kim Leadbeater, Lord Falconer and the PMB’s eleven co-sponsors to simply confirm whether they accept or contest Sir James’s calculation of the possible dire impact on the High Court. Yet, despite Leadbeater’s oft-stated commitment to a “robust and well-informed” debate, I never got an answer. Indeed, the only response to my (reasonable and polite) enquiries was the newbie Labour MP and only legally qualified co-sponsor of the PMB, Jake Richards, blocking me on social media (then scoffing about having done so when challenged by an acquaintance).

Instead of addressing such questions – which they must surely have anticipated – supporters of the PMB chose instead to hide behind the disingenuous notion that “this debate has to proceed not on the basis of pounds and pence. It has not to be a debate about money, but about morals.” Yet no minister has ever stood up at Second Reading of a government Bill and said: “I cannot tell you how the provisions in this Bill will actually work, or how much they are likely to cost the taxpayer. And we may well change them anyway. But if you like the general idea of this Bill, please vote for it today.”

However, what worked prior to and at Second Reading will not work at committee stage. It’s now clear that the Bill’s committee stage will be more like that of a government Bill, not a PMB. Immediately after MPs backed the Bill by 330 votes to 275 on Friday, Kim Leadbeater tabled a motion to give the committee the power to take oral and written evidence, thereby remedying one of the key deficiencies of the PMB process. And it would be ludicrous for the Committee to take such evidence without subsequently debating it. So it is safe to assume that the committee will sit multiple times over weeks or even months, rather than just the single, short sitting that is all most PMBs experience – during Friday’s Second Reading debate, Ruth Jones noted that, in the last session of Parliament, the average PMB committee stage involved a mere 35 minutes of debate.

The committee will want to see the Government’s impact assessment, and – if the Second Reading debate is anything to go by – the minister on the committee will face a raft of searching questions from well-prepared and heavily-armed opponents of the Bill. I watched Friday’s debate, and to my mind the best of the 44 speeches were all made by such opponents – most notably Danny Kruger, Rachael Maskell, Meg Hillier, Jess Asato, Ruth Jones, James Frith, Florence Eshalomi and Ben Spencer – while the flimsiest were made by leading supporters of the Bill such as Paula Barker, the laughably dim Christine Jardine, and the aforementioned Jake Richards. And the debate’s low point was provided by newbie Labour MP, Cat Eccles, who pompously rose during Danny Kruger’s speech to make a pointless point of order (and later doubled down on social media).

Furthermore, in the run-up to the Second Reading debate, a number of MPs published incisive and considered statements setting out the reasons why they would be voting against the Bill. For example, Labour MP and Chair of the Science, Innovation & Technology Committee, Chi Onwurah, noted:

The Bill is flawed, there has not been sufficient parliamentary and public debate, [and] instigating State support for the taking of life should not be done through a Private Members’ Bill.

Detail on the implementation and the resources is lacking and there is no impact assessment … The Bill will have to work not in a theoretical world with great palliative care, a well-resourced NHS and great respect and emotional support for the dying and terminally ill, but in the real world with patchy palliative care, an under-resourced NHS, and where the dying may lack emotional support or even be subject to coercion … There has not been sufficient public or parliamentary debate for a Bill of this nature … I know that homosexuality and abortion were legalised through PMBs, but I do not accept the implied moral equivalence … Even without the slippery slope argument, extending the State’s abillity to support, sanction and assist in the taking of life requires wide-ranging consultation, research, debate and consideration.

So, while Kim Leadbeater gets to pick the committee, and she and her supporters will have an in-built majority, I predict the committee’s weeks or months of deliberation will be an intellectual mismatch, and that, by the time the Bill reaches Report stage/Third Reading on 25 April, it will be a Private Members’ Bill in name only.

Unlike at Second Reading, the repetition of simplistic points and the telling of emotional stories and outright untruths by Leadbeater and her supporters will have proved woefully inadequate in the face of oral and written evidence from external experts and hand-to-hand combat with MPs opposed to the Bill. The Government, not Leadbeater and her supporters, will have had to fill the information and legislative gaps, and through their advocacy for their own amendments ministers will have assumed direct responsibility for whatever kind of suicide service, safeguards against coercion, and associated training programmes for doctors and the judiciary Rachel Reeves – who voted for the Bill on Friday – is happy to fund out of her £40 billion fiscal black hole.

Meanwhile, as reported by the rabidly pro-assisted suicide Guardian, many in the Government will continue to tear their hair out in frustration at how the Bill is “dominating the conversation and causing conflict between Labour ministers and MPs. “It’s a nightmare,” one official told the paper last week: “If [the Bill] passes [Second Reading], it will eat up so much time. And it’s causing divisions among our MPs when we have worked so hard to try to build bonds between them.” Another reportedly said “Keir [Starmer] wanted it to happen. It’s that simple. There isn’t anyone else who thought this was a particularly great thing to do in the first months of a Labour government.”

Which is presumably why the issue was not even mentioned in Labour’s election manifesto. And now, having upset pensioners and many Labour MPs by cancelling this year’s winter fuel allowance, and the farming community over inheritance tax, the Government has, in the reported words of yet another insider, got itself “in the situation where the first thing we are seen to be offering [in terms of improving the NHS] is making it easier for people to die”.

Oh well. That’s life, I guess.