Uk politics

Jezza is one of the oldest Out campaigners in the Commons. He’s not quite the ‘Father of the Outs’ – Bill Cash claims that honour – but the Labour leader is next in line. Yet the referendum has led him to a shrewd, albeit unprincipled, decision. If your enemies are tearing each other apart, pull up a chair and enjoy the show. Hence his silence on Europe. A slow but strengthening civil war has begun within the Tory party and the vote itself will sound the death-knell for many a high-profile Conservative. So Corbo’s pleasant task is to sit back and wait for the funerals.

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.

Jeremy Corbyn’s much-awaited appearance at the weekly meeting of the parliamentary Labour party didn’t go particularly well this evening, which means that for the group of increasingly determined MPs trying to oust him, it was a hugely successful session. MPs were reminded that the meeting is off the record at the start, before being given a lecture by the leader about the importance of message discipline. They were told that there would be weekly messages that MPs should stick to. A number of MPs found this ‘unpalatable’, and some left.

The papers report today that many Conservatives are furious with the way David Cameron is conducting the referendum campaign. MPs threaten that if the Prime Minister continues with the personal attacks that he launched at various opponents on the 'Leave' side this week, it will impossible for him to continue at leader after the referendum, whatever the result. Today Iain Duncan Smith exacted some revenge on the Prime Minister with his own attacks on the Remain side, offering the Marr Show a rather furious critique of the campaign's tactics.

David Cameron’s slap down of Boris Johnson on Monday was one of the most brutal, and personal, that I’ve seen in six and a half years of reporting on parliament. But, as I report in my Sun column today, Number 10 are now keen to calm things down. Indeed, even some of Cameron’s closest allies now concede that the tone he took with Boris on Monday was a mistake. I’m told that Cameron and Boris have been in contact and are now exchanging, dread word, ‘bantery’ texts. One well-placed source is clear that the ‘PM’s tone will be much more emollient from now on’.

Jeremy Corbyn is this weekend campaigning against Labour Party policy. A year ago, it would have been quite unremarkable for the then obscure backbencher to turn up to the CND rally and give a speech against nuclear weapons. But now he's the Labour leader, Corbyn will be speaking against the current official policy of the party he heads up. This has obviously annoyed the many pro-Trident MPs in Labour, though some of their public frustration includes feigned surprise, given their party elected a man who sticks to his principles like glue, and who has hardly snuck those principles up on his party after election. He's been going on about them for years.

Quite naturally, those campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union have seized on today’s net migration figures as evidence that staying in won’t resolve voters’ concerns about immigration. Priti Patel has said that ‘the proposed deal will do nothing to reduce the level of immigration from the EU, and will leave unelected politicians in Brussels and judges from the EU court in control of our borders’. Liam Fox has decided to go further. He points out to Coffee House that it is impossible for David Cameron to both campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union and continue to commit to the net migration target - and that the Conservative party should drop that target.

So, FTSE 100 company bosses have come out in favour of staying in the EU – even if, as Ed West notes, the 198 signatories in a letter to the Times represent only 36 companies. I wonder if anyone dropped out at the last moment to reduce the tally below the figure of 200. Of course big business supports the EU. It always has and always will. But who cares? What matters is what smaller, wealth-creating and job-creating businesses think. And they are much more Eurosceptic. A YouGov poll published in January revealed the huge divide between big business and the rest of the private sector on the issue. Out of 501 leaders of small and medium enterprises polled only 47 per cent favoured continued membership, with 42 per cent favouring withdrawal.