Isabel Hardman

What is Labour’s priority at the moment? Normally the sensible answer for an Opposition party would be that it needs to focus on policy, and particularly on talking about next week’s Budget. But it is very difficult for a party polling so far behind the one in government and that is so divided to have much authority when it criticises ministers on policy. So when John McDonnell gave his pre-Budget speech today, his focus couldn’t just be on what he expects Philip Hammond to get up to and what Labour would want from the forthcoming economic statement.

In the past few minutes, the government has lost a vote in the House of Lords on a key aspect of Brexit: the status of EU nationals. Peers are at the Committee Stage of the bill that allows the government to trigger Article 50, and despite attempts by Home Secretary Amber Rudd to reassure them that this issue will be the priority once the negotiations for Britain to leave the European Union have begun, they backed Amendment 9b, which says the government should guarantee now that EU nationals living in the UK will have their rights protected. The House voted 358 to 256 for the cross-party amendment. Rudd was watching the debates this afternoon.

Shami Chakrabarti and Peter Whittle would probably furiously deny playing by the same political rules. But this morning on the Andrew Marr Show, the Labour peer and Ukip politician were both using suspiciously similar scripts to try to excuse poor performances by their party leaders in Thursday's by-elections. First up, Peter Whittle on how Paul Nuttall managed to squander a golden opportunity in Stoke Central. Nuttall was on a trip, of the kind that apparently often happens after a by-election, so he couldn't explain for himself. Whittle referred to personal attacks on Nuttall.

Labour's famously vocal moderates have been awfully quiet today, given one of their number – Jamie Reed – has just been replaced by a Tory in a hugely embarrassing by-election defeat for the party. The centrist wing of the party, now almost exclusively a backbench club, has taken a vow of silence because it doesn't want to be accused of salivating at the loss of a seat or of conforming to the 'Bitterite' stereotype of MPs undermining the Labour brand. This is particularly important given some Corbynites are still blaming last summer's attempted coup by the Parliamentary Labour Party for any catastrophe it encounters, including losing Copeland. That coup didn't remove Corbyn. But what it did do was remove the ability of the moderates to speak out with much authority.

If ever you wanted to understand what Theresa May’s relationship with her top ministers is like, today’s Cabinet meeting provides some insight. The ‘majority’ of the session, which lasted more than an hour, was taken up with a discussion about the importance of the Union. Not a discussion in which any of the problems raised by Brexit for the Union, such as the problems with the land border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, were addressed, but a general discussion on how everyone present supported the “most successful political union of countries that has been seen”.

Theresa May has been visiting Stoke-on-Trent today ahead of the ‘really important’ by-election in the city on Thursday. That the Prime Minister is bothering to pitch up to a campaign in a Labour heartland suggests that the Tories at least think they are in with a fighting chance of winning the seat - otherwise it would be not just a waste of May’s time but also a bit embarrassing if they were seen to have thrown not just the kitchen sink but also the PM at the fight. Labour, meanwhile, is throwing kitchen sinks wildly and at great expense in the two by-elections due this week, including buying the front page of the local newspaper in Copeland on a number of occasions to make stark warnings about the threats it claims the Tories pose to the local NHS in Cumbria.

MPs are finally making their way out of Parliament - or staying for Ed Miliband’s late night adjournment debate - after the first day of Committee Stage of the Article 50 Bill. As explained earlier, the real fireworks are expected tomorrow, and any flashes of drama today came from MPs complaining about the lack of time available for scrutiny. This ended rather noisily in a roaring match between Alex Salmond and Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle over the amount of time allocated to the SNP for speeches in the extended session. Earlier, MPs had chastised Natascha Engel when she was in the Chair for not allowing a number of amendments to proceed to a vote. The Deputy Speakers were getting it in the neck when the fault for the lack of time available for scrutiny lies with the Government.

MPs will shortly begin their Committee stage of the Article 50 Bill in the Commons. Before that begins, Theresa May had one more chance to try to reassure colleagues who are considering voting for amendments to that Bill by giving a statement to the House on the informal EU summit in Malta that took place last week.  She repeatedly told MPs, both in her statement and in her answers to questions afterwards, that reaching an agreement on the status of EU citizens in the UK was a priority and that it needed to be a ‘reciprocal’ agreement. She also warned the Commons not to obstruct the Article 50 Bill.

Is the government trying to avoid scrutiny of its Brexit policy? That’s the charge that MPs on the Labour and SNP benches are levelling at ministers today as the White Paper on leaving the European Union is published. Keir Starmer told the Commons this afternoon that he and his colleagues were being hampered in their attempts to ask decent questions and properly scrutinise the government’s approach because they had been handed the document just minutes before David Davis gave his statement on the publication. The SNP’s Stephen Gethins complained that the whole situation was a ‘mess’ and that Parliament was being mistreated. These complaints were echoed from the benches behind them.

The debate over the Bill allowing the government to trigger Article 50 has been surprisingly good-natured, so far, given the stakes. There have been some impressive speeches from all sides, and even some humour. We have learned very little about what the Bill entails and have been largely unsurprised by what each MP has said: Labour is in a very miserable place and shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer laboured this point with great feeling. Ken Clarke opposed the referendum, opposes leaving and isn’t going to change his mind.

Theresa May’s visit to Washington to meet President Trump last week was seen, before it happened, as being beneficial to both sides. The Prime Minister’s allies in government thought this was an excellent opportunity for May to show the new President how it was done - and to send a message to the world that Britain really matters. But today things look a little less advantageous for the Prime Minister. That her visit was swiftly followed by Trump signing an executive order which halts all refugee admissions and temporarily bans people from seven countries has put the Prime Minister under pressure to criticise the man whose hand she ended up holding. Initially she didn’t - and was heckled by the press when dodging their questions on the matter.

Just a year ago, the phrase ‘Brexit rebels’ denoted Tory MPs like Peter Bone who had a distinguished pedigree of pushing the government to be as Eurosceptic as possible, with the odd eccentric comment along the way. Today, it means former Cabinet ministers such as Nicky Morgan, who are trying to push the government away from a ‘Hard Brexit’ - also with the odd eccentric comment about trousers. Those new Brexit rebels are now demanding that the government publish a White Paper on Brexit. Morgan, Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry want the government to ‘formalise the government strategy in a “reasoned fashion”’, as Grieve put it. This really isn’t the most difficult demand that the government has faced on Brexit.

The Government may be accepting its defeat in the Supreme Court graciously overall, but David Davis was in a rather dismissive mood when he responded to Labour’s questions about the ruling in the House of Commons this afternoon. The Brexit Secretary gave a statement to the House explaining that ministers would publish ‘within days’ a bill that would give the Government the legal power to trigger Article 50. Both in the statement and in his responses to questions about it, he repeatedly told the Chamber that it would be a 'straightforward’ bill. Meanwhile the Government had already offered MPs plenty of scrutiny of the Brexit negotiations, and the Prime Minister had given the clearest speech on her negotiating position that Davis could think of.