Isabel Hardman

The stronger the prospect of a general election, the easier it will be for Boris Johnson to get through the week that Britain was supposed to be leaving the European Union. He had said he would rather 'be dead in a ditch' than miss the deadline, but is now taking a two-pronged approach to distracting everyone from the fact that Thursday will come and go, and Brexit will still not have happened. The first part of this plan is to make sure that it is clear parliament is to blame for missing the 31 October deadline, rather than the Prime Minister who placed so much emphasis on it. So the repeated message from Johnson and his allies is that 'this parliament is broken' and that the 'country is being held hostage'.

One of the defining themes of this week has been the government threatening to do something dramatic, before manifestly not carrying out that threat. We’ve had No. 10 sources claiming Boris Johnson would pull his Withdrawal Agreement Bill if MPs voted down the programme motion, only for the Prime Minister to announce he is 'pausing' it, before then making a bid to the Labour Party to resurrect the legislation with a longer timetable. We’ve also seen the demise of Johnson’s claim that he would rather be found 'dead in a ditch' than delay Brexit beyond 31 October. Though the Prime Minister hasn’t openly acknowledged that he’s missing the deadline, his 12 December election bid was an attempt to move the conversation straight past an awkward admission.

Nothing in Caroline Flint’s CV would have marked her out as someone who would end up marshalling 19 of her fellow Labour MPs through the ‘aye’ lobby to vote for Boris Johnson’s deal. One of the original ‘Blair babes’, she went on to become Gordon Brown’s minister for Europe. She campaigned for Remain in the referendum but this week she ended up telling MPs that ‘the EU is not God’ while fending off accusations that she is the devil. One commentator called her ‘a heroine for those seeking to turbo-charge Thatcherism’. He didn’t mean it kindly. When we meet in her office, on another one of the supposed Brexit make-or-break days, she is preparing for further battle.

Boris Johnson has cancelled his appearance before the Commons Liaison Committee tomorrow morning, arguing that he feels he should devote himself to trying to secure a Brexit deal. In a rather last-minute cancellation, the Prime Minister has written a personal note to the Committee's chair Dr Sarah Wollaston in which he argues that it would be much better for the MPs to question him when he has been in the job for five to six months, as it did with his predecessors. This is a valid argument, but it would carry more weight if Johnson had made it from the outset, rather than at the sort of time that students start trying to come up with slightly daft-sounding excuses for not handing in an essay that was set months ago.

The debate on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill is as noisy as you might expect, given how high emotions are on both sides. What is less predictable is whether MPs will be debating the legislation tomorrow, or whether the government will pull the bill after losing its programme motion vote tonight.  It’s not clear where the numbers are for this vote on the timetable for scrutinising the legislation. But the Tories have made the threat of pulling the legislation after a defeat and moving to an election. Behind the scenes, whips and No. 10 aides are working feverishly to try to shore up their support, not just from Tory MPs but also those on the opposition benches.

Appropriately, given the length of time it has taken politicians of all colours to continue putting off taking any sort of decision on Brexit, the government has decided to try to break the legislative speed record this week by rushing through the Withdrawal Agreement Bill in just a few days. Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg announced the timetable for the legislation in a business statement to the Commons this afternoon, telling MPs that they will be rattling through the second reading tomorrow, as well as starting the committee stage, which will continue the following day, with all Commons stages wrapping up by Thursday. There are threats to make MPs sit until midnight in order to meet this timetable, which is extraordinarily brisk for such a landmark piece of legislation.

Boris Johnson is still pursuing today's vote as a decisive moment for the Brexit deal, rather than the start of yet another delay, with the Letwin amendment meaning the real meaningful vote could be moved to Tuesday. His opponents are speaking in a similar vein, framing the choice facing those MPs yet to make up their minds as being one concerning how trustworthy the Prime Minister is. Perhaps the most powerful argument against trusting Johnson came from DUP Westminster leader Nigel Dodds, who told the Chamber that: 'It was once said that no British prime minister could ever agree to such terms and indeed those who sought the leadership of the Tory party said so at our conference'.

Boris Johnson has just given a very upbeat press conference about his Brexit deal, despite the DUP being clear that they will not back it. The Prime Minister hinted that he would be seeking the support of MPs across the Commons instead, saying: 'I'm very confident that when MPs of all parties look at the deal, they will see the merit of supporting it, getting Brexit done on October 31st, honouring the promises that were made repeatedly and giving us all the chance to move on'. Downing Street is working hard on Labour, independent and ex-Tory MPs to try to garner their support, and Johnson tried to address some of the concerns set out by Jeremy Corbyn about protections for workers and the environment. He told journalists that the government had made 'commitments gladly' on these issues.

If today's Queen's Speech was meant to offer a preview of what the next general election and life after it will look like, you might be forgiven for wishing you were somewhere far, far away from British politics. The debate in the House of Commons this afternoon was turgid and pointless. It was almost as if everyone involved couldn't quite be bothered to rise to the occasion of a new legislative programme because they knew that it was more of a political messaging operation. Jeremy Corbyn gave one of his least convincing speeches as Leader of the Opposition, which is plumbing quite some depths. He managed to both dismiss the whole event as a charade, while indulging in line-by-line analysis of the Speech.

Boris Johnson is now in what's known in cricket as the 'Nervous Nineties', when a batsman becomes so anxious about reaching his century that he takes unusually conservative decisions - or is so nervous he accidentally gets himself out. We are now in what could be the final few days of the Brexit negotiations, and the Prime Minister is trying to be unusually cautious about what's said and done. Ministers are being urged to hold their nerve rather than make comments which could push the talks off course, and No. 10 is remaining very tight-lipped. In a cabinet call this afternoon which a number of ministers described as 'businesslike', Johnson updated his top team but made clear that there wasn't a great deal to say at this time.

Boris Johnson will seek an extension to Article 50 if there is no Brexit deal by 19 October, documents read out in court today have revealed. This contradicts the Prime Minister's assertion that he would rather be 'dead in a ditch' than delay Britain leaving to after the current deadline of 31 October. So what's going on? The revelation comes in the government's written case for a hearing on whether the Prime Minister will be in contempt of court if he doesn't send the letter to the European Union asking for the extension which he is mandated to do by the Benn Act. The document says that 'he cannot act so as to prevent the letter requesting the specified extension in the Act from being sent.

In a first for Parliament, an MP has spoken openly and in detail about her experience of being abused emotionally and sexually by her partner. In an incredibly emotional speech, Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, told the Chamber about a relationship which started so promisingly but which was in fact a controlling one, full of rage and fear. She spoke of how her partner continued to tell her that he adored her, that she was all his, even as she was trying to work out how to leave, timing his morning showers so that she could quietly steal his keys and get him locked out of their home. Her hands shook and a doughnut of colleagues sat around her - as they so often do on all sides of the House when they know a member is about to tell their own traumatic story - to support her.

This afternoon's law and order theme to Tory conference did take a bit of a knock when police were called to an altercation involving one of the party's MPs, resulting in the backbencher, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, being sent home. Not long after this incident, which sent parts of the conference centre into lockdown, Priti Patel walked onto the stage and announced that 'today, here in Manchester, the Conservative party takes its rightful place as the Party of Law and Order in Britain once again'.