Isabel Hardman

The most striking aspect of Labour’s response to the Queen’s Speech yesterday was that it is ‘sympathetic’ to the Tory plan to lower the £26,000 benefit cap for workless households to £23,000. This is a policy position that Harriet Harman developed after some discussion with the rest of the party as she prepared to respond to the Speech. The party is well aware that it struggled to respond well to the introduction of that cap in 2010, and that given it ended up being one of the most popular policies pollsters have ever touched, it can’t make the same mistake again. But what’s interesting is that not all leadership candidates agree with this.

Boris has finally spoken. Intervening on his Tory colleague Cheryl Gillan, who was complaining about a lack of funding for rural public services and transport, the new MP for Uxbridge said 'Will she not agree that in fact her constituents get a superb service from Transport for London?' He thanked the government for its continued investment in London transport. Boris will continue to work as Mayor and focus on these duties. But it will be interesting to see what non-London interventions he makes before stepping down in 2016.

Chris Bryant is haunted by Labour’s general election defeat. He has taken his former colleague Douglas Alexander’s office, and Commons staff have been appearing to collect the former Shadow Foreign Secretary’s computers. ‘They were referring to the computers as “the defeated computers”,’ he says. ‘Politics is quite brutal.’ The defeated computers are a sad symbol of Labour’s loss: Alexander was one of Labour’s many election chiefs, but is now just an ex-MP. But Bryant, who says he did feel in his gut that Labour was going to lose, still seems rather chipper.

The government’s announcement that EU migrants will not be able to vote in the EU referendum tells us a number of things about the way David Cameron is approaching this vote. Firstly, he’s keen to show everyone that he’s getting on with it - indeed, the Prime Minister seems reinvigorated on all fronts at the moment - and making announcements about the franchise is just one example of that. The second is that Cameron does not want the debate about the referendum to be one of an Establishment stitch-up. Allowing EU citizens to vote would be one way of encouraging such a narrative from certain parts of the ‘Out’ camp. And thirdly, Cameron is keen to preserve party unity as much as he can on an issue that naturally splits his party.

David Cameron was in an extremely confident mood when he addressed the press at the end of today’s EU summit in Riga. He continually joked about journalists needing to write stories about the trials and tribulations of his EU renegotiations over the next couple of years, but those stories not meaning very much at all. ‘My advice would be - a bit like the election, really - wait for the result!’ he said gleefully when asked whether he would get what he wanted from the renegotiation. But he later admitted that ‘I’m not going to say I was met with a sort of wall of love when I arrived.

Liz Kendall is the great unknown Labour leadership candidate. She is the only one who hasn’t been in government or Shadow Cabinet, and as I blogged earlier, she needs to show that she has got qualities that make up for this lack of experience. She made a pretty good start on this at the press gallery lunch today, as the first candidate to speak to, and take questions from, journalists. Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham will presumably agree to the same event at some stage - and they now have a hard act to follow. In her opening speech, Kendall painted a rather brutal picture of where her party had ended up and why it had lost. She said: ‘This defeat was epic. We lost by a magnitude few predicted or imagined. The election demands a new era for the Labour party.

The three main Labour leadership candidates have now all said that they want a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU. But the party’s ‘official’ position - that is, the policy it went into the last election with that everyone seems quite keen to disown - is that there should not be a referendum. The party will not have chosen its leader by the time of next week’s Queen’s Speech, even if MPs seem to be making their minds up pretty quickly, and so when the EU referendum bill is published in that speech, the party will need to respond. It would perhaps make sense if that response wasn’t a repeat of the old Miliband policy, given all the candidates likely to succeed him want a referendum.

There seems to be a checklist for Labour leadership hopefuls which all of them are very keen to tick off. When launching a campaign, a candidate must say that their party has just suffered a terrible defeat from which a number of profound lessons must be learned. These lessons all seem to be rather similar, and have led the candidates to say the following things: ‘We didn’t speak enough to aspirational voters’ Mary Creagh: ‘People felt that Labour didn't understand their aspiration to earn money and provide a better life for their family.’ Chuka Umunna (when he was standing): ‘We need to… focus on what is the new agenda that is going to get a Labour government elected in 2020.