Parliament

Unless Theresa May delays the vote, 11 December 2018 might be about to become one of the most important in recent British history; more important even than 23 June 2016. If MPs vote down Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, as nearly all ministers expect them to, they will set Britain on course for either the softest possible Brexit or a second referendum. In the process, they may well split the Tory party. Theresa May’s strategy has been to play chicken with Parliament. Her team saw virtue in intransigence and calculated that at the last moment MPs would get out of her way. They thought that fear of no deal would bring former Remainers into the fold. Simultaneously, Leavers would reluctantly take this imperfect Brexit over the risk of no Brexit at all.

It's 100 years today since women were able to stand for Parliament, and the Women and Equalities Committee marked it with a hearing on the barriers to getting more female MPs. It has only been in the past few years that the total number of women ever elected into Parliament has passed the number of men currently sitting on the green benches, and 32 per cent of MPs are women. This puts the UK at 48 in the world rankings for gender representation in its Parliament, which isn't great. I was one of those giving evidence to the Committee this morning, using research I've conducted for my book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians.

Could you afford to go into politics? Chances are that the answer is no, unless you’ve got a spare £10,000 knocking around. In a survey that is being published later this week, I’ve found that candidates in general elections are having to stump up tens of thousands of pounds of their own money just to stand. This is not the money spent on campaigning, which is funded by the parties and donors to individual campaigns. It’s the personal expenditure that comes with having to take up to two years off work to campaign, moving to the constituency if you are not local, travelling around the constituency, attending events and so on.

How embarrassing for Tory MPs: one of their own has managed to block the unblockable: a bill creating a new criminal offence of 'upskirting'. Plenty of Conservatives have turned on the culprit, Christopher Chope, both in WhatsApp groups and in public, to show that they do not have the same views as him. To be fair to Chope (and it is hard, especially for a magazine that prefers its motto of 'firm but unfair'), he wasn't suggesting that upskirting was in some way OK. He is part of a group of MPs with the odd hobby of objecting to Private Members' Bills on principle because they don't think that MPs from opposition parties should be able to write laws which could cost the government money or could be very bad policy. Oddly, though, this doesn't stop them introducing their own bills.

MPs are frantically deleting casework emails after being mistakenly advised that new regulations mean they have to clear the data that they hold on constituents. The General Data Protection Regulation comes into effect on 25 May, and is the reason your own inbox will be flooded by companies who've been sending you unsolicited emails for years who are now asking if you want them to stay in touch. It also has an impact on parliamentarians, who retain years' worth of correspondence about constituency matters. Recent briefings from the Commons authorities and political parties have left office staff and MPs confused about what they are allowed to keep, with one briefing suggesting that all data from before the snap election had to be deleted.

Theresa May likes to avoid awkward rows at all costs: that much we already know. Today's papers carry two stories showing this: she is said to be abandoning plans to give a Brexit speech just in case it causes further divisions in her Cabinet, and is also racking up what The Times estimates is a £230 million bill by delaying the refurbishment of Parliament. Both the Cabinet and Parliament are dangerously unstable, with chunks falling from them every day. The latter, though, has been here a long time, is one of the most famous buildings in the world, and attracts vast numbers of tourists. Philip Hammond and Greg Clark don't raise quite so much interest, oddly.

Diet nannies will spend Christmas telling us ‘you are what you eat’ but in the House of Commons ‘you are where you sit’. Are you a Tory Whips’ stooge or a Dominic Grieve groupie aching to block Brexit, a braw new blue Scot or an English provincial plodder without hope of advancement? Parliament-watchers discern plenty about your political leanings from where you park your posterior. Each side of the Commons chamber has five green-leather benches that are divided by a gangway. On the government side of the chamber, all MPs are Conservatives except for a couple who have had the Whip withdrawn. On the opposition side, the lower four benches ‘beyond the gangway’ (i.e.

There's relief in No 10 today after Theresa May and Jean Claude Juncker finally reached deal on the Irish border, EU citizens' rights and the so-called Brexit bill. The European Commission have subsequently recommended that 'sufficient progress' has been achieved in time for this month's EU council meeting – and that the Brexit talks should move on to trade in the new year. In order to get to this point, May has agreed a £40bn Brexit bill, time-limited ECJ role and a promise of no hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic. However, for the government the hard work is only just beginning. The second round of negotiations is where the real battle will take place.

Last week the Daily Telegraph’s front page showed the 15 Tory MPs who had voted against the government under the headline ‘The Brexit Mutineers’. One of the first things pointed out was that two thirds of the group were lawyers. (In fact, only nine of the 15 are barristers or solicitors; a tenth is the son of a High Court judge, but in the hereditary meritocracy in which we live, that counts as the same thing.) This seemed to be taken as a point in their favour — who wouldn’t want our politicians to be sensible lawyers? Certainly, it contrasted with the disdain shown for journalist-politicians, like Michael Gove or Boris Johnson. Would we really rather our MPs were lawyers than hacks?

Have you heard the one about the new Labour MP who refuses to be friends with Tories? When Laura Pidcock dropped into an interview with a left-wing website that she has ‘absolutely no intention of being friends with’ any Tories, she was surprised by the fuss that followed. It might have seemed odd to her, but within Parliament it’s well known that friendships that cross the divide spring up the whole time. Sometimes it’s personal: Kezia Dugdale, leader of the Scottish Labour Party, caused headlines when she started dating a nationalist MSP. But more often, political: to achieve something, MPs from different parties often have to work together. But the new member for North West Durham sounds as if she is appalled at the whole system.

One of the most noticeable things about MPs as they amble around Westminster today is how tired so many of them look. They’ve been kept up late the past two nights by unusually long sittings of the House of Commons, with the final three-line whipped votes not taking place before 10pm on both days. On Monday, it was the second reading of the EU Withdrawal Bill, and last night a prolonged debate on the Finance Bill meant everyone had to hang about until later to vote on Andrea Leadsom’s plan to make the Conservatives appear to have won the election outright after all by guaranteeing the government a majority on all public bill and secondary legislation committees.

What a surprise: a government trying to make it easier to get legislation through the House of Commons. Today's Huffington Post story that Leader of the House Andrea Leadsom is trying to ensure that there is a Tory majority on every committee scrutinising legislation is just the latest example of Theresa May's government making every effort to make life easier for itself. Journalists at the Number 10 lobby briefing today pointed out that the Tories haven't actually won a majority and therefore do not deserve to have a majority in public bill and delegated legislation committees. Rather astonishingly, the Number 10 spokesman responded that 'the government has a majority on the floor of the House'.