Uk politics

Education Questions in the Commons is a chance for MPs to ask questions about Education - or at least to suck up to ministers by asking them questions about what a good job they are doing. But today Nicky Morgan seemed to be talking about something that wasn't so much tenuously related to her department as completely irrelevant. In her exchanges with Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary managed to end up talking about Europe. She said: ‘Isn’t it typical, Mr Speaker, that on that side of the House, they need to learn the lesson that the Vote Leave campaign needs to learn as well, which is that if you talk about the negatives all of the time, you’re going to find that they are self-fulfilling?

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.

Sir Jeremy Heywood is currently insisting to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs select committee that there is absolutely nothing untoward about his guidance to civil servants about withholding documents that have a bearing on the EU referendum from ministers. ‘I’m really struggling to see what the problem is here,’ he has just argued to MPs. The row is occupying the energy of an awful lot of Tory MPs at the moment, and is unlikely to go away. One way that ministers could escalate the dispute is to work with backbenchers and use departmental questions in the Commons to make their point about the impact that this guidance has on their ability to do their jobs from day to day.