Last week, the House of Lords tried to halt Brexit, as they sent Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement back to the House of Commons, after it suffered three consecutive defeats in the upper chamber. Peers voted for EU citizens to have the right to be given official documentation if they lawfully reside in the UK after Brexit. They backed a cross-party amendment to the Withdrawal Agreement Bill allowing for physical proof of status.

The second defeat was over the power of British courts to depart from European Court of Justice judgments and the third swiftly followed when peers backed a move to allow cases to be referred to the Supreme Court to decide whether to depart from EU case law.

However, the Commons – where the Conservatives have an 80-seat majority – overturned all of the amendments last Wednesday and the Brexit Bill officially became UK law.

As Britain prepares to finally leave the European bloc on Friday, unearthed reports shed some light on the House of Lords’ repeated attempts to stop Brexit.

In 2013, former Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to hold a referendum on Britain’s European Union membership if the Tories had won a majority in the next general election.

The following year, former Conservative backbencher James Wharton put forward a private members bill as a device to bind Mr Cameron even more tightly to his promise of an in-out vote.

The bill would have potentially bound the next government into holding one, although in theory, a non-Tory administration could have reversed it.

However, Labour and Lib Dem peers in the House of Lords voted to end the committee stage of the legislation by 180 to 130, giving the Bill no time to get through.

Speaking at a press conference in Oxfordshire alongside François Hollande, the former French president, Mr Cameron said that the bill’s progress made no difference to his pledge.

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He said: “As Labour and the Lib Dems have killed the Wharton Bill, the one way to guarantee a referendum is to vote Conservative at the general election.”

Mr Wharton told the Financial Times the public was “disappointed” that his bill had died.

He said: “Labour and the Lib Dems have conspired in the House of Lords to kill this important piece of legislation, doing the bidding of their political masters in the Commons,” he said.

“It’s now clearer than it has ever been that it’s only the Conservatives who will give people a choice on this important issue.”

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Labour peer Lord Anderson of Swansea said Mr Cameron’s promise of a referendum was mistaken because eurosceptic Conservative MPs would always demand more from the leadership.

He said: “And they will ask for more, rather like the penguins in the penguin house they will swallow it down and demand more.

“The trouble is that this government may be inclined to give it to them.”

In the 2015 general election, Britons elected a majority Conservative government and Mr Cameron confirmed in his victory speech that there would have been an “in/out” referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

Peers backed calls to give 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds the right to take part in the EU referendum but the amendment was reversed by Conservative MPs in the House of Commons.

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