Isabel Hardman

When will ministers hold their vote on Trident renewal? The Sun reports today that the ‘main gate’ decision on the size of the fleet will take place by the end of March, throwing Labour into disarray ahead of elections in Scotland, Wales, London and local government. Cunning thinkers in the Tory party point out that for the vote to have maximum political effect, it needs to take place closer to the start of March. This is so that MSPs can also have a debate on Trident in the Scottish Parliament before Holyrood rises on 23 March for the election campaign.

Even though, as Fraser argued last week, Google has done nothing wrong in agreeing to pay £130 million to settle its UK tax claims, MPs were in a furious mood about the agreement when they discussed it in the Commons this afternoon. John McDonnell asked an urgent question on the deal, and found, unusually, that he had support from across the House. It wasn’t just Labour MPs who stood up to condemn what they saw as one standard for their constituents, who are hounded by the taxman over relatively small claims, and another for big powerful multinationals like Google. Tory MPs joined in, too, with Steve Baker telling David Gauke that the deal was ‘at once derisory, substantial, lawful and completely unacceptable to the public’.

Given last year’s election was so much about the possibility of the SNP and Labour working together in government, Labour figures will be smiling ruefully at Nicola Sturgeon’s interview on the Andrew Marr Show today, in which she stuck the boot into the party she once suggested a ‘progressive alliance’ with. The Scottish First Minister is of course thinking more about fighting Labour in this year’s Holyrood elections than about the Westminster Parliament, and so she wanted to paint her main challengers as weak and confusing.

Angela Eagle wasn’t told about a controversial plan to ban companies who do not pay a living wage from paying out dividends to shareholders before Jeremy Corbyn floated it in a speech last week, Coffee House understands. I have learned that the Shadow Business Secretary was not consulted over the proposal, which is believed to have triggered the resignation of the Labour leader’s Head of Policy and Rebuttal, Neale Coleman. Corbyn floated the idea in his speech to the Fabian Society on Saturday, saying 'another proposal would be to bar or restrict companies from distributing dividends until they pay all their workers the living wage'.

What does David Cameron mean when he says, as he did today, that he’s happy to wait a bit longer for a deal in his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the European Union? The Prime Minister told the Davos summit today that ‘if there isn’t the right deal, I’m not in a hurry’ and that ‘it’s much more important to get this right than to rush it’. The expectation in Westminster has been that Cameron would get a deal at the European Council summit in February, but the Prime Minister has been dropping hints that he is prepared to let the timetable slip at the same time that his colleagues are saying privately that they are confident of a deal.

David Cameron didn’t have a particularly good PMQs today. He struggled to make sense at some points, ending up telling the House that ‘two out of three people who want to become a nurse can’t become a nurse because of the bursary system’ and rambling about ‘two out of three Vickys’ being turned away from nursing courses, which left everyone wondering what the stats were for people not called Vicky. The Prime Minister’s assertion about the bursary system costing so much that fewer nurses overall go into training may well be true, in the same way that saying ‘affordable housing quotas make housing less affordable’ can be true in policy terms.

Labour’s report on its election defeat is finally out, and it says there are four reasons for its defeat: Failure to shake off the myth that we were responsible for the financial crash and therefore failure to build trust in the economy. Inability to deal with the issues of ‘connection’ and, in particular, failing to convince on benefits and immigration. Despite his surge in 2015, Ed Miliband still wasn’t judged to be as strong a leader as David Cameron. The fear of the SNP ‘propping up’ a minority Labour government. These are not surprising, and the report’s narrative verdict on how the party lost is far more interesting.

Emily Thornberry might not know why Jeremy Corbyn made her Shadow Defence Secretary, but she will have known that this afternoon’s departmental questions for the Ministry of Defence was going to be a difficult session. She came armed with two questions that she knew few would listen to, and delivered them well. But for the rest of the session, she had to listen to MPs on all sides of the Commons attacking not the government of the day, but the policy of the Opposition party. In fact, the government was barely scrutinised at all today, so intense was the focus on Labour and its potential U-turn on Trident.

George Osborne’s Newsnight interview has drawn ire from the Eurosceptics chiefly because the Chancellor used it to stamp on any suggestion that there might be a second EU referendum in which Brussels offered the UK all the changes it wanted in the first place in order to tempt it back into the European Union. But Osborne also reiterated last night that the ‘Treasury is 100 per cent now focused on achieving the renegotiation’ and wasn’t drawing up contingency plans for Brexit. The problem for ministers is that any admission or leak of such contingency plans would be written up as a Whitehall panic, or a secret desire on the part of the Prime Minister to leave the EU.

It must come as a relief to many Labour MPs worried about their party’s electoral chances that the official report into why Labour lost in May will finally be published. But will it really make much of a difference? The BBC reports that the document, compiled by Margaret Beckett, will identify four key reasons for the party losing in May 2015, which are that it failed to shake off the myth that Labour was responsible for the financial crash and failed to build trust on economic issues, it didn’t connect with voters on key issues such as benefits and immigration, that Ed Miliband was not seen as being as strong a leader as David Cameron, and voters’ fears of the SNP propping up a minority Labour government. So far, so unsurprising.