Isabel Hardman

MPs are continuing to chip away at John Bercow as best they can. At questions following the Business Statement in the Commons this morning, Simon Burns repeated his question about that 'floating' letter that he mentioned after Prime Minister's Questions and which the Prime Minister has been joking about to Tory MPs. Hague pointed out that 'things do not float around in Number 10. That is not the way Number 10 operates, I'm very pleased to say. The Prime Minister has received a letter this week from you, Mr Speaker, I'm sure you don't mind me saying, in which you ask that the appointment of Carol Mills is delayed further until a clear way forward on this issue has been agreed. And so that is the current status of the letter rather than any… floating.

If there is a strategy buried under the 'no strategy' response by the US and the UK to Isis, it seems to be that David Cameron and Barack Obama have preferred to make the case for greater military involvement by waiting for everyone else to get frustrated that nothing is happening. Where a few weeks ago, there was plenty of muttering about the polls and the public being weary of intervention, we see today that voters are starting to push for greater UK involvement. They are not, of course, in favour of boots on the ground (one of those phrases that is as worn out now as a very old boot, along with 'knee-jerk response'): the Sun's poll finds 58 per cent of voters are against ground troops.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_4_Sept_2014_v4.mp3" title="Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss the Tory civil war" startat=60] Listen [/audioplayer]Tory backbenchers, who have been happy for months, are once more sunk in gloom, sitting in dejected huddles in the Commons tearoom. William Hague went to gauge the morale of the troops there this week and was told by one MP that the atmosphere was akin to the tail end of 1996; a party waiting for what feels like inevitable defeat. In public and on the news Tories put on a brave face, but in private, it’s grim. But while the Tory leadership has lost the momentum it built up over the past few months, there is one group feeling distinctly perkier.

How do the Conservatives make the Clacton by-election more difficult for Douglas Carswell? I hear from two extremely well-placed sources that the selection for the Tory candidate will be an open primary. Carswell himself bemoaned the demise of this selection method when he announced he was leaving the party to join Ukip, and party sources have been muttering for a few days that the authority of the new Ukip candidate is rather undermined by his decision to shunt the poor, bewildered local Ukip chap, Roger Lord, out of the way. Now sources tell me that the party will revive open primaries for this election to make it more difficult for Carswell.

If the Tories did want to really fight Douglas Carswell in the Clacton by-election, then Boris Johnson would have been a jolly good way of driving a steamroller over Ukip's chances of doing well. James explained at the weekend that when David Cameron reached the same conclusion and put the feelers out to the Mayor, word came back that Johnson felt Clacton was too far away. But today Johnson suggested that those feelers weren't particularly robust ones.

Nick Clegg had a stab at being René Magritte on the Today programme this morning, telling us that a disagreement between the two coalition parties over anti-terror measures that were sort-of announced yesterday was 'not some argument between two political parties'. It was clear from the way the Deputy Prime Minister described the additional measures for TPIMs that the Lib Dems accepted David Anderson's demand that the government do more, but that only the first option, the expansion of exclusion zones, is something that will wash. Relocation powers, the key power removed from control orders when the Coalition scrapped them, would prove far more controversial, even though the Tories are clearly happy to keep an open mind on introducing these if necessary.

The talks between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives on the anti-terror measures that David Cameron will unveil this afternoon have finally finished. There are a few more details to be thrashed out - crossing of Ts and dotting of Is rather than major policy decisions - but the two parties are basically there. That the talks have only broken up with just over an hour to go until the statement shows how contentious these measures have been in the Coalition. David Cameron's press conference, in which he set out the heightened threat, was partly a softening-up exercise to push the Lib Dems into accepting what the security and intelligence services had told him: that they needed to plug the 'gaps in Britain's armoury'.

What should worry David Cameron more, Douglas Carswell's defection to Ukip or reports that as many as 100 Tory MPs could go into the general election pledging to leave the European Union? The former is certainly more dramatic and promises plenty of humiliation over the next few months. But the latter could show the Prime Minister that he doesn't have as much time on European reform as he would like, and that he is still not trusted by a large contingent of his party. It is one thing for Better Off Out members such as Mark Reckless to pledge to campaign to leave, no matter what reforms David Cameron manages to secure.