Isabel Hardman

The Investigatory Powers Bill has its second reading in the Commons this afternoon, with Labour planning to abstain and make its support for the timing of the legislation conditional on the Home Secretary satisfying a number of concerns that the party has. Separately, I understand that Tory MPs such as Liam Fox are pushing for a generous timetable for the legislation, including committee stage taking place on the floor of the Commons. Fox points out that 'there's not much other legislation about', though this has never stopped ministers giving controversial pieces of legislation very tight timetables for debate. So far, though, Theresa May has been in a very consensual mood while drawing up the legislation.

Look! All this sniping at Jeremy Corbyn is wrong and now we have proof. The Labour leader is not in fact trashing his party’s brand. Today a poll from ICM puts the Conservatives and Labour level on 36 per cent, a jump of four points for the opposition and a drop of three for the governing party. But before Corbynistas have had a chance to gather up their red flags and take to the sunny streets to celebrate, ICM has already issued a clarification which, in essence, trashes the poll’s finding.

Based on the tone that he took on the Andrew Marr Show this morning, we can expect George Osborne to take a rather defiant tone as he unveils this week’s Budget. The Chancellor has had a difficult few weeks, not least because of the retreat on pension reforms and defeat on Sunday trading, but he tried to turn this into a virtue, saying: ‘The big picture is people look at Britain and they see a country getting its act together and putting its house in order. And if you look at what we do as a government, I think we take big, radical, reforming steps. Yeah, we have got a small majority, so do we win every vote? No, we don’t. But you can do two things in the face of that. ‘You can either shut up shop and do nothing - that is not me as a politician.

What is Labour's biggest obstacle to getting back into government any time soon? Those who've spent any time thinking about the general election result - and the party still doesn't talk that much about May 2015 - will say that until voters trust the party on the economy, it is not going to succeed. John McDonnell's team clearly agrees, briefing the media today that the reason the Shadow Chancellor is making a major intervention on the economy as he prepares for the Budget is that voters were wary of Labour on the economy.  McDonnell's speech today sounds remarkably similar to the messages Ed Balls offered before the election, that Liz Kendall annoyed members with in the leadership contest and that Rachel Reeves produced in her own speech just days ago.

David Cameron’s referendum campaign trail continued today, with the Prime Minister visiting Chester and giving a speech defending Britain’s membership of the European Union. And on the other side his Cabinet colleague Chris Grayling gave a speech warning about the dangers of continuing to stay in the bloc. Neither speech today was particularly angry with the other side - though separately Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott accused the Prime Minister of being ‘desperate to change the subject from his failure to deliver his manifesto promises on immigration’.

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.