Uk politics

In the past few minutes, the government has lost its attempt to relax Sunday trading laws in the Commons 317 votes to 286. The rebellion has been brewing for months, with ministers playing a game of chicken with angry Tory backbenchers right up to the vote. A last-minute attempt by George Osborne to stave off the rebellion by proposing a series of pilots of the relaxed rules, tabled as a manuscript amendment in the middle of the morning, failed when the Speaker rejected it. This has not helped Osborne’s standing amongst MPs, with some remarking that the whole exercise had shown that the Chancellor had still not learned what the limits of the Tory party’s patience were.

One of the striking things about the European Union referendum debate so far - apart from how cross everyone is with each other - is how blokey the whole thing has been. There are high-profile women on either side of the debate - Theresa May (who has been rather quiet since her announcement that she was backing ‘In’), Nicky Morgan, Nicola Sturgeon and Caroline Lucas for ‘In’, and Priti Patel, Andrea Leadsom and Theresa Villiers for ‘Out’ - but most of the big interviews and rows about who is backing which side have featured men. Yet women are the key swing voters in this referendum.

There is no small irony in the fact that Labour MPs were this evening reminded by their colleagues not to brief details of tonight’s parliamentary Labour party meeting before a spokesman for Corbyn went out into the Committee Corridor to, er, brief journalists about what happened at the meeting. The official account is that there was a ‘sea change in the atmosphere’ and that ‘Jeremy faced down his critics’. MPs coming out did say that the meeting wasn’t as shouty as previous encounters, but one moderate suggested that this was because there is a greater sense of resignation and that ‘people just can’t be bothered to get angry any more’.

Boris Johnson’s admission to Andrew Marr that Brexit ‘might’ cost people their jobs has quite inevitably been seized upon by the ‘In’ campaign as a sign that a vote to leave would put people’s livelihoods at risk. The Mayor of London came on the show to make the positive case for Britain leaving the European Union. It was his first big challenge as one of the key figures in the Out campaign, and as James argued yesterday, he needs to match David Cameron’s efficacy in putting his side’s case across. He did give an entertaining interview in which he scrapped with Andrew Marr over who had ‘sovereignty’ over the programme, and he did offer some good examples and illustrations of why he wanted to leave. https://soundcloud.

Boris Johnson’s attack on David Cameron’s EU deal as achieving ‘no real change’ is part of the very high-profile campaign that the senior Tories campaigning for Brexit are waging. They have covered the media over the past week with interviews, quotes and rebuttals to every claim that the Prime Minister and his allies have offered. What is interesting about Boris’ comments is that he is trying to take the debate back to the question of whether Cameron actually got anything in the renegotiation. The Prime Minister has rather pointedly moved on from talking about that, focusing now on the dangers posed by a ‘leap into the dark’, which requires a debate about Britain’s overall membership, rather than the changes he has secured.

This is from tonight's Evening Blend email, a free round-up and analysis of the day's political events. Subscribe here. Today in brief François Hollande warned that there would be ‘consequences’ for the British-French border deal that keeps migrants at Calais. Boris Johnson responded to the warnings that Brexit could lead to a ‘Jungle’ on UK soil with ‘Donnez-moi un break’. Jeremy Corbyn rejected the ‘failed economic orthodoxy’ espoused by the previous Labour government and called for a ‘new settlement with the corporate sector’. Caroline Lucas attacked Labour for its ‘silence’ in the EU referendum. Sajid Javid said he was still a ‘Brussels basher’ despite backing the campaign to stay in.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsangryamerica/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth, Fraser Nelson & Isabel Hardman discuss the opening skirmishes of the EU referendum campaign" startat=540] Listen [/audioplayer] Stuart Rose will have to be added to the long list of British businessmen who have struggled to make the transition to politics. Rose, the Chairman of Britain in Europe, didn’t get off to the best of starts in this campaign when he told The Times that ‘“Nothing is going to happen if we come out of Europe in the first five years, probably. There will be absolutely no change’ a quote that was seized upon by the Out campaign who said it disproved all the dire warnings about the immediate consequences of leaving.