Isabel Hardman

According to a spuriously scientific study, today is the day when festive excess gets the better of us, with one in two Brits opting to stay on the sofa with the curtains closed fretting about bills and weight gain. So how fortunate it is that Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have chosen to rouse a hungover nation today with their stirring new year messages. Ed Miliband promises that he will be setting out 'concrete steps' on how One Nation Labour will work, citing business, education and welfare as examples. He does add that he doesn't 'offer easy answers and I'm not going to offer false promises either'. But it's difficult to see how the Labour leader can make any promises at all on areas such as welfare without talking about money.

As is becoming increasingly clear to David Cameron, the problem with answering calls for an inquiry into a scandal in one industry or another is that at some point that Inquiry will report back with a bunch of recommendations which may or may not be politically expedient to implement. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards came up with proposals last week for an electrified ring fence, which the Treasury politely said it would look at, and Vince Cable rather more bluntly said the government should ignore, preferring instead that ministers get a move on with implementing the Vickers proposals, rather than opening up the whole debate again.

In spite of the best efforts of its ministers in the Lords, it looks as though the government is going to face a vote on the dreaded boundaries legislation early next year, with the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill returning to the Upper Chamber in January. The big story is that the Lib Dems will be able to kick the reforms away until 2018 using an amendment, but it isn't just the members of the smaller Coalition party who will be rebelling against government policy. Tory MP Glyn Davies has now come out as an opponent of the reforms, too. On his blog, he writes that he is 'contemplating voting against my government for the first time' for a number of reasons.

Whose fault is it that the Tory party is so rebellious? Some think it's the beastly backbenchers, while others argue it's the Tory leadership. I was amused to watch a beaming Brian Binley lead David Cameron into the 1922 committee on Wednesday, given the backbencher was only recently penning an angry letter to the press about how the Prime Minister was ruining everything. There will always be people like Binley in every party, and Downing Street has made very clear that it would answer his desire for a move to the right by staying firmly in the centre ground. But are there really are so many other Conservative MPs who started out as thorns in the flesh from their first day in Parliament?

David Cameron's appearance before the 1922 committee was designed to reassure his party, and he tried to do this by promising them that the Conservative party would be strong on Europe in 2015. It has been a hard term, and today's PMQs was savage, so the Prime Minister decided to start his speech by telling them to think about the Conservative party's record in government. He touched on welfare, on schools, on the NHS - in particular mixed sex wards and waiting times - and income tax. He is clearly looking forward to the next election, too, as he mentioned the appointment of Lynton Crosby, to cheers from those listening, as well as attacking the Labour party. He also told the MPs about the importance of a strong and united Conservative party.

As expected, today's report from the Commission on a Bill of Rights offered little. With a membership evenly split between Tory and Lib Dem nominees, it was set up to fail. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who resigned from the Commission in March, tells me that this problem was exacerbated by the way in which it was run: it was barred from discussing either the European Court of Human Rights or the Convention. He says: 'The Commission was not able to have a productive discussion because of the determination of the civil service to produce an artificial argument'. Attention now moves to what the Conservatives will say about the matter in their manifesto.

Think the Commons is in uproar at the moment over gay marriage? Just wait until the legislation makes its way into the House of Lords. The received wisdom is that equal marriage will go into the upper chamber, but never make it out alive after a savaging from socially conservative peers. But is that true? If it's uproar you're looking for, then you're unlikely to be disappointed, but the chances of angry words in the chamber translating into embarrassing defeats for the government aren't quite so high. Remember that after 13 years of Labour in power, the House has a large liberal-leaning majority. There are 224 Labour peers and 90 Lib Dems.