Isabel Hardman

In his statement to the Commons this afternoon, David Cameron confirmed that ministers will be free to campaign for Britain to leave the European Union - and he gave a hint about when the referendum might be, too. The Prime Minister told the Chamber that he couldn’t guarantee agreement at February’s European Council summit, but: ‘If [agreement] is possible, the I’m keen to get on and hold a referendum. We shouldn’t do it precipitately, I’ve looked at previous precedents, I note that when Labour held a referendum in 1975, there was only a month between the completion of the legislation and the referendum. I don’t think that’s enough.

Jeremy Corbyn is currently conducting his reshuffle, with a group of journalists huddled at a discreet distance from the Labour leader’s office. So far, not much has happened, other than Corbyn asking the journalists not to stand outside his office, and Barry Gardiner emerging with a smile on his face. But still the briefings around the reshuffle and the anticipation of it have dominated the news agenda. This must be intensely frustrating for Sadiq Khan, who had planned to spend today getting lots of attention for his campaign on train fares. Labour members and staffers were up long before dawn handing out leaflets publicising the four-year fare freeze promised by the party’s mayoral candidate.

David Cameron’s pledge to his MPs that none of them who want to stand again in 2020 will be left behind as a result of the boundary changes is a sign that the Prime Minister thinks party management will be seriously important this year. A fight between MPs over fewer constituencies would have been bad for party morale, and inevitably theories about MPs favoured by the party leadership being kept safe would have spread through the party. But given the changes aren’t being submitted until 2018, the decision to announce the ‘no-one left behind’ pledge now suggests that Cameron thinks 2016 is a good year to calm any Conservative nerves on this matter. Why could that be?

Labour is very cross about a knighthood going to the man who ran the election campaign that beat the party in May. Andy Burnham issued a statement about Lynton Crosby’s inclusion in the New Year’s Honours list which was supposed to highlight what his party thinks is an abuse of the system. But really, it just highlights his party’s own failings. The Shadow Home Secretary said: ‘This outrageous award is the clearest evidence yet that the Tories think they can get away with whatever they like. It is a timely reminder that Labour must make it a New Year’s resolution to stop facing inwards and expose them for what they are.’ Why do the Tories think they can get away with whatever they like?

Should celebrities really shut up about politics? Nick Timothy makes a persuasive argument on ConservativeHome that Benedict Cumberbatch et al should stop lecturing theatregoers and pontificating about Edward Snowden because they lower the standard of political debate in this country. He writes: ‘So if I had a wish for 2016, it would be that these pompous, hypocritical, self-obsessed political celebrities would take a vow of silence. If that proves impossible, surely it is time for our politicians and the media to stop humouring these vain and ignorant liberal luvvies.

Why should Lynton Crosby get a knighthood? The Sunday Times today reports that the Conservatives’ election chief is in line for an honour, which has provoked fury from democracy campaigners and, naturally, those aligned with the parties he helped to humiliate in May. The fury of the Labourites is quite easy to understand, and not just because it is miserable seeing the guy who was instrumental to a surprise election victory that many around Ed Miliband thought was theirs being honoured. It’s also because many of them will complain that he is a negative force in politics, someone who isn’t averse to flinging a dead cat on the table at a moment’s notice when the chips are down.

David Cameron’s Christmas message is being reported as one of his most Christian public statements yet, with the Prime Minister arguing - as he did at Prime Minister’s Questions recently - that ‘it is because of these important religious roots and Christian values that Britain has been such a successful home to people of all faiths and none’. Cameron has - with the occasional rather odd hiccup - become much more confident about talking about Christianity, both in terms of his own beliefs and the importance he thinks faith should have in wider society, since he described his personal faith as being ‘a bit like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns - it sort of comes and goes’.

Should ministers have so many special advisers? Should a party that promised to cut the number of these SpAds if it came to government admit that it got this wrong, having increased their number? The arguments in favour of more of these political staffers in government are well-rehearsed: if they’re good, they add expertise and political nouse to a department and they make it easier for ministers to communicate what they’re up to. Some are hopeless at both these things, but the best ones - and there are many excellent ones in both main parties at the moment - often keep the show on the road and ensure reforms actually happen. Last week it emerged that the SpAd bill had risen from £8.4 million in 2013/14 to £9.2 million in 2014/15.

If the responses to last week’s Paris agreement on tackling climate change are anything to go by, you’d think politicians were warming to the issue. David Cameron said that ‘this generation has taken vital steps to ensure that our children and grandchildren will see that we did our duty in securing the future of our planet’. But the political excitement around the summit was not part of a trend, but a mere spike in interest. Politicians don’t talk very much about green issues at present. They barely discussed the environment at all during the election, and generally see it as being of such low salience that they needn’t talk too much about it. But there are some in the Tory party who don’t think that’s the right approach.

The Strathclyde Review into the power of peers to block legislation sent up by the Commons reports today, and it is expected to strip the House of Lords of its ability to kill off secondary legislation. And the way the government will bring in this reform, which will enshrine the primacy of the Commons, is by primary legislation, which means that if peers try any funny business, ministers can deploy the Parliament Act and force the change through.  Labour says this is a 'massive overreaction' to the tax credits row earlier in the autumn. But this reform, naturally, won't change two major problems with secondary legislation that have very little to do with peers.

Today at Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron quoted Gary Porter, the Tory chair of the Local Government Association, praising reforms in the spending review that will allow councils to raise money for the cost of social care using council tax. The Tory leader was using the quote to prove Jeremy Corbyn wrong in his warnings about the NHS and social care. He said: ‘If he wants to swap quotations, this is what the chairman of the Local Government Association says: “The LGA has long called for further flexibility in the setting of council tax… Today’s announcement on council tax will go some way to allowing a number of councils to raise the money needed…The £1.5 billion increase in the Better Care Fund announced today is good news”.

George Osborne has been busily signing more devolution deals today, with five pilot schemes moving power over health policy and spending from Whitehall to London boroughs. It’s part of the Chancellor’s devolution revolution that he is making a key part of his brand. It’s also - as is always the case with Osborne - a bit of clever politicking. Osborne caught Labour on the hop with his devolution deal for Greater Manchester earlier this year, with Andy Burnham struggling to work out what the party’s official line was on Labour councils happily signing up to a Tory deal. Many of his Labour colleagues were unimpressed with the then Shadow Health Secretary’s response to the deal.