Isabel Hardman

How do you unite the Labour party and cheer them up? Today the party’s MPs were cheering happily and laughing along at the jokes offered from their Dispatch Box for the first time in months. And on Monday, they managed to have a cheerful meeting of the parliamentary Labour party. One thing that was missing from both sessions was Jeremy Corbyn. The cheer that accompanied Angela Eagle as she got to her feet to ask her first question of George Osborne, who was standing in for David Cameron, was full and sincere.

What if David Cameron does win his fight - staged or otherwise - with European leaders to block benefits for EU migrants for four years? In terms of his pitch to the British public that voting to stay in the bloc is a good idea, this win would be very handy indeed. But would it actually materially change anything? Today, in an evidence session to the Treasury Select Committee, Office for Budget Responsibility Stephen Nickell rather undermined the importance of this row between leaders when he ended up telling MPs that it wouldn’t make much of a difference to immigration from other EU countries to Britain anyway. He said: 'I am prepared to say that any changes to benefit rules are unlikely to have a huge impact on migration flows.

Donald Tusk’s letter to European Council members highlights the choice that David Cameron faces in his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe. Either he insists that EU leaders meet his demand of a four year block on benefits for new migrants, thereby delaying the process, or he drops the demand in order to get consensus on the matter and then faces the prospect of selling a ‘new relationship’ that doesn’t look all that new and doesn’t contain a key change that most voters will understand. Tusk’s letter goes through Cameron’s four demands for reform.

It’s not a great surprise that Ken Livingstone is a member of Momentum, the Corbynite grassroots organisation that is definitely not at all like Militant, and definitely not going to campaign for de-selections in constituencies. He revealed his membership on BBC News, saying ‘I mean, I’m a member of Momentum. Our task, the first thing we’re focusing on, is getting those two million voters who have been kicked off the voting register by the government’s new rules, getting out to them, getting them back on that register. It’s a campaigning organisation, not some nasty bit of work like the old Militant. Seb found the same when he spent an evening eating curry with Momentum in Oldham.

David Cameron has dropped his plans to sign off his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe at the December European Council summit, accepting that he’s not going to get the deal he wants within the next few weeks. In a call today with Angela Merkel, the Prime Minister ‘noted that the scale of what we are asking for means we will not resolve this in one go and consequently he did not expect to get agreement at the December European Council’, a Downing Street spokesperson said. The summit will instead involve a ‘substantive discussion of the proposed changes in each area’.

After 10 reasonably dismal hours, Hilary Benn has just given a truly historic speech in the House of Commons. (Here's the full text.) The Shadow Foreign Secretary garnered loud applause and an emotional waving of order papers from members across the house. His colleagues tell me he wrote much of it while sitting on the frontbench in the Commons during the debate. Benn made the only truly spellbinding argument in the whole of this largely unimpressive debate. He ran through why he believed that the conditions for action had been met, appealing as he spoke to Labour's heritage. He was furious and passionate but impressively generous towards the man who claims to lead him, telling the Chamber that Corbyn was not a terrorist sympathiser as David Cameron alleged but a man of principle.

MPs are currently in a cross-party briefing with a number of Cabinet Ministers about tomorrow’s vote on Syria. The Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary and the International Development Secretary are leading the briefing. Number 10 is very keen to show that MPs have had every opportunity to ask questions, with the Prime Minister’s statement on the Strategic Defence and Security Review last Monday referring to the need for action, as well as his statement in the House on Thursday on his plan for British involvement in air strikes. In that second session, he took questions from 103 MPs.

Tonight’s meeting of the parliamentary Labour party could have been a lot worse. It was full of very concerned MPs, many of whom had complaints they wanted to air. A senior Labourite did say it was the most ‘uplifting’ meeting he had attended because of the ‘ferocity’ of attacks on Corbyn. Jack Dromey gave an angry speech about Ken Livingstone’s comments about the 7/7 bombers, which colleagues leaving said was ‘brilliant’, while others expressed concerns about Corbynite grassroots group Momentum, arguing it was going to divide the party. David Winnick described the group as a ‘party within a party’.