Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs remain confident that they will force the government into a U-turn over forced academisation. Though departmental sources are pushing back against reports in today’s Financial Times that ministers are putting the brakes on the reforms, they cannot answer the question of how the changes would actually get through the House of Commons. And though David Cameron put up a spirited defence of the policy at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Tory MPs have been saying that they have yet to see the evidence base for forcing schools that may be perfectly successful and stable into changing the way they are run.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that Scottish Labour will oppose Trident renewal in the party’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections. The party did hold a symbolic vote on the matter at its conference last autumn, and delegates voted against renewal of the nuclear deterrent, despite Kezia Dugdale’s own preference for multilateral disarmament. And it’s not a surprise that this has enraged trade union GMB Scotland, which is pushing for a vote in favour of the Trident successor programme at today’s Scottish Trades Union Congress conference. SMB Scottish Secretary Gary Smith accused the Scottish Labour party of playing ‘fast and loose with thousands of livelihoods at Faslane, Coulport, Rosyth and across our wider defence-related industries’.

‘The Commons at its best’ is a bit of a pompous phrase that people apply to all sorts of sessions in Parliament that aren’t really the Commons at its best at all. But the Commons at its worst is surely easy to find: it’s when MPs meet on a Friday to discuss Private Members’ Bills. These sessions have turned into a circus of MPs proposing slightly rubbish legislation, and Philip Davies or one of his colleagues talking that legislation out so that there cannot be a vote on its second reading, thereby killing it.

Although the weekly meeting of the parliamentary Labour party is a private affair, Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman offers journalists lurking in the committee corridor outside a briefing as soon as it has concluded. Today he had to take questions from hacks on whether or not his boss goes to McDonald’s - prompted by the news that the Labour party is banning the fast food outlet from having a stall at its party conference. Both the staff and the burger ban came up at the meeting. It started with an observation from Baroness Armstrong that the Labour leader now has a phalanx of staff with him when he attends these sessions, as opposed to just one or two advisers.

Rather like the 2015 General Election campaign, the EU referendum campaign feels as though it has been going on rather a long time. And yet today is in fact only the start of the official ten-week campaign. There may be some in Westminster who are filled with great excitement at the thought of another ten weeks of bickering about who has the most negative campaign. But the campaigns do have the difficult challenge of motivating those who back them to get out and vote on the day, and endless fighting and negativity about negativity won’t quite do the trick.

Tory MPs are increasingly convinced that the government may back down on some of its plans for forced academisation of all schools, I understand. The Commons is currently holding an Opposition Day debate on the plans, confirmed in last month’s Budget. They have upset a good number of Conservative MPs and councillors, not least because they appear to contradict the government’s commitment to localism. A large number of MPs are complaining in the debate about the dangers of imposing the academy model on all schools, and removing the requirement for academies to have parent governors.

Just a few days into the official campaign for the Holyrood elections and Ruth Davidson has had to change her tactics. The plan had originally been for the Scottish Conservatives to run a serious campaign which has fewer tanks than the election campaign, and more serious speeches. ‘We tried that whole idea of you know we're going to do this really stripped down, just speeches, and just like listening to people bla bla bla,’ says Davidson. ‘And then kind of all the press went this is really boring and we went, yeah, it kind of is.’ And so Davidson has been playing ice hockey, racing blue and red cars, and driving a ski-doo. When we meet, she is touring a very serious looking factory.

David Cameron will give a statement in the Commons addressing the row about his tax arrangements, with George Osborne expected to publish his own tax return in the coming days too. That the Prime Minister has had to prepare a statement for MPs so that he can avoid being hauled to the Commons by Labour with an urgent question shows both how serious this row is for Cameron, but also how he is trying to compensate for being unprepared last week. He had clearly underestimated how potent the revelations in the Panama Papers would be, thinking that they could be dismissed with a mere line about this being a ‘private matter’. The bitty statements and changes of tack that came over the following days shows that no-one in Downing Street really thought Cameron was in any danger.

You can tell a lot about how a party’s press operation thinks things are going from who it sends out to do its dirty work on the airwaves. Yesterday the Conservatives sent Michael Fallon out to defend the Government’s £9m pro-EU leaflet, which suggested that they knew it was going to be controversial and would need defending by someone skilled at sticking to the line, even when the line is totally untenable and difficult to defend. Today, Nick Boles popped up on Radio 4 to defend David Cameron’s eventual admission that he had indeed made money from the offshore fund set up by his father.

David Cameron has defended the £9m government leaflet promoting the EU as ‘money well spent’ and ‘necessary’, as the Tory party erupts into fury once again. What’s interesting about this new row - over a leaflet sent to all homes which sets out ‘why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK’ - is that it has incensed not just those usual suspects who are annoyed that the Remain side already has a natural advantage in the referendum campaign in that it can wheel out the Prime Minister for guaranteed media attention whenever it likes.

Downing Street has spent the past 24 hours trying to clarify David Cameron’s links to an offshore fund set up by his late father, which never paid tax in Britain. Initially, Downing Street said this was a ‘private matter’, Cameron was then asked about the matter, and said ‘I own no shares, no offshore trusts, no offshore funds, nothing like that. And, so that, I think, is a very clear description.’ Then Downing Street issued a statement saying ‘to be clear, the Prime Minister, his wife and their children do not benefit from any offshore funds’. And today Number 10 had to clarify further: ‘There are no offshore funds/trusts which the prime minister, Mrs Cameron or their children will benefit from in future.