Isabel Hardman

MPs on the Defence Select Committee made a similar warning this morning about the UK's withdrawal from Afghanistan as Con Coughlin made in The Spectator last month. He wrote that Britain's 'attempt to undertake a dignified retreat from Kabul has all the makings of yet another Afghan disaster'. You can read the full piece here, but here are the main points that it makes, followed by the main warnings from the select committee's report: 1. Is the ANSF ready to take over? Because of a failure to defeat or reach a political settlement with the Taleban, the withdrawal plan depends on trusting Afghan troops 'who have already shown a worrying ability to switch sides'. Coughlin outlined a trend of 'green on blue' killings in recent months.

Well, that was inevitable. Sir James Crosby's announcement that he wants to give his knighthood back and forego a slice of his pension is surprising only in that it came a little sooner after the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards' report than everyone expected. He could have waited for a real public outcry to build, as it did with Fred Goodwin, but instead he's managed to walk off with a pension that's still £406,000 and perhaps a little dignity. Fraser argued last week that politicians are the ones who should be squirming over the banking crisis, but what Crosby's decision today shows is that the Banking Commission is wielding an impressive amount of power as it rumbles through its inquiries and reports.

In 1983, a Spectator piece argued that 'the most faithful followers of the Thatcher cult are to be found within the Labour Party'. Baroness Thatcher's passing was always going to be as much of a test for the Left as it would be a sad day for the Right. The Labour leadership knew this, and took care to craft statements and tweets which, while acknowledging the glaringly obvious political differences, praised Thatcher the woman. The party has suspended its political campaigning ahead of the local elections as a mark of respect. Ed Miliband's tribute in particular made clear that he had no sympathy with those in his party tempted to celebrate the death of the Iron Lady.

Tory backbenchers have written again to the Prime Minister demanding legislation guaranteeing a referendum in the next Parliament. Conservative MP John Baron delivered the letter, which bears more than 100 backbench signatures, to Downing Street this morning. While its existence was reported in the Sunday papers, Baron has now spoken exclusively to Coffee House about the letter's contents. I understand that though Baron and his colleagues working on the plan approached only backbenchers (and those include former ministers who left the government in September's reshuffle), a number of ministers and PPSs have also approached them to express sympathy with the idea, and there are several individual letters from PPSs going to David Cameron as well.

One other area besides immigration where Tory MPs want their leader to go further than he feels he can is, unsurprisingly, Europe. There is growing pressure within the party for the Prime Minister to get legislation on the floor of the House of Commons which would guarantee a referendum in the next Parliament. This is what Bernard Jenkin, who favours a referendum sooner than 2015, has to say: 'The Prime Minister's veto in 2011 gave his poll ratings a great fillip, but that veto was just ignored. They just decided to go ahead with the Fiscal Union Treaty anyway but without the UK. And the UK did not achieve any safeguards to protect UK banking and financial services which the PM was then demanding.

Boris Johnson makes a tricky interviewee. He's charming, vague, witty and able to turn the conversation to his advantage with his ornate language and humour. If all else fails, he does something with his hair. But today the Mayor of London met his match with the equally charming and witty Eddie Mair on the Marr Show. Mair confronted him not just with persistent questions about his ambitions, but also clips from this week's documentary on Johnson which appeared to show him discussing whether to hand over the details of a journalist to his friend Darius Guppy so Guppy could have him "physically assaulted." Mair then moved in for the kill.. "And you, having heard that, tell your friend that that you will supply the address. What does that say about you, Boris Johnson? Making up quotes.

It's not just Nick Clegg who is having a good long think about immigration at the moment: David Cameron is as well. He's got a big immigration speech on Monday, which shows how spooked the parties are by UKIP that they feel they need to at least address the topic, even if they insist that they're not adopting Nigel Farage's terms of debate. As he writes his speech, Cameron will probably have in mind the looming problem of how many Romanian and Bulgarian migrants are coming to this country when transitional controls lift at the end of 2013. If he doesn't, he should, because that backbench debate from Mark Pritchard on this issue now has a date: 22 April.

So the latest twist in the surreal saga of statutory regulation of the press is that the campaign group which had unparalleled access to the three parties hammering out a settlement in the silent watches of the night now thinks there's been a terrible mistake. Whoops! Hacked Off has put out a statement this afternoon which says the amendments to the Crime and Courts Bill approved by MPs on Monday night contain 'an accident in the drafting' and is now trying to change the amendments so that they won't impact bloggers and small publishers. You can read the full statement here, but this is the key section: 'The amendments are the work of Conservatives in government and not of Labour, the Liberal Democrats or for that matter Hacked Off. 'They have not been endorsed in any way by Hacked Off.