Isabel Hardman

There's one government adviser who still feels Steve Hilton's absence very keenly indeed. 'He was always thinking ahead, how do we set the debate rather than endlessly react to it, that was why he was such a delight to work for. All the time he was racing ahead. It was difficult to keep up with him. I just thought he was brilliant, he was just wonderful.' But it's not a Tory MP or spinner who is missing the Prime Minister's 'blue-sky' guru: this adviser is Labour MP Frank Field, appointed by the government when it formed to work with David Cameron on how to tackle poverty. He suspects that it was Hilton's departure that led to the review that he painstakingly compiled gathering dust on a Number 10 shelf, allegedly unread.

Some Tories are all aquiver today after the Prime Minister's radio hint yesterday that he might be prepared to introduce an EU referendum bill in this parliament after all. Here are David Cameron's words on yesterday's World at One that are supposed to set your heart pounding: 'I think we need to demonstrate absolutely that we are serious about this referendum; we’ve said we’re going to hold it, we’ve said it’s going to be an in-out referendum, we’ve set a date by which it must be held.

It's not a case of will they, won't they when it comes to whether Labour would borrow more, but will they admit it and try to sell this plan to voters? In the past few days, we've seen the party trying to work this out in public. Ed Miliband, in his awkward World at One interview, knew that saying 'yes, we'd borrow more to fund the VAT cut' would provoke triumphant howls from his opponents, and so ended up nervously jabbering away as Martha Kearney asked the same question over and over again. But yesterday he told Daybreak that 'I am clear about this: a temporary cut in VAT, as we are proposing, would lead to a temporary rise in borrowing'. He added that 'I suppose I felt it was rather a commonplace' to make that clear the first time around.

Not wanting to heap worries onto the Prime Minister when he's just about found harmony with his party, but as well as the underused backbenchers I mentioned this morning, he might want to think about his party's PPSs as well. Some of them feel they were offered their jobs with the promise that the role would become 'turbo-charged', but haven't found the reality quite so glamorous. I hear that the last meeting Downing Street held for ministerial aides didn't cheer many of them up.

David Cameron is really trying to reach out to his party at the moment. The announcements of a policy board of MPs and a policy chief who is also an MP were intended to show that it's not just the inner circle that calls the shots. Jo Johnson appears to have received a bigger promotion than initially announced: today's Sun reports he's not just leading on policy, he's also taking over from Oliver Letwin in writing the manifesto. But appointing Chris Lockwood to the policy unit has added to the impression that the PM really trusts his friends and those who hail from the same social circle. He did, after all, name this journalist as one of his friends in evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. It is an unfair impression: a proper look at the policy board reveals MPs from a range of backgrounds.

How do the Tories deal with UKIP? The party likes to split on most issues, and it has got a nice little fault line running across it at the moment on whether to squash the party as 'fruitcakes', or, as Conor Burns eloquently argued on Coffee House this morning, engage with the problems and anxieties that are driving Tory voters towards Nigel Farage. If UKIP does have a good showing in the local elections later this week, one side will blame the other for taking the wrong course. MPs like Burns will worry that colleagues such as Ken Clarke will have insulted their own voters, or that the party's obsession with whether all those nice-sounding pledges really add up has missed the point.

Bids for the 2015/16 spending review will land on George Osborne's desk today from Secretaries of State across Whitehall. Some, like Iain Duncan Smith and Patrick McLoughlin, are signed up to the idea that their departments need further cuts. McLoughlin, as a former chief whip, prefers to avoid conflict, while Duncan Smith has made it known for some time that he'd like a bit of conflict with the Lib Dems over his budget, with a number of cuts sitting ready on his desk if only Nick Clegg and colleagues backed down on their refusal to touch Work and Pensions spending again.