Isabel Hardman

Philip Hammond held the Budget today to avoid a bunch of Halloween jokes about a zombie economy and so on. To compensate, the Chancellor brought a bunch of random sentences in fancy dress as ‘jokes’. There were inexplicable quips about poaching rabbits, a medley of toilet puns accompanying funding for keeping public conveniences open, and the strangest of all: ‘fiscal Phil says fiscal rules, OK.’ What the Chancellor hadn't dressed up, though, were the series of announcements in this Budget. They weren’t fancy. Or radical. There was some political appropriation, with Hammond trying to deal with a few Labour threats by stealing their policies.

The consensus in the Conservative party is that Theresa May's visit to the 1922 Committee last night hasn't materially changed anything. Those who want her gone are still plotting her demise. A larger group of her MPs are very frustrated and unhappy. And there are still a good number of loyalists prepared to make supportive noises about the Prime Minister in the Chamber or 'crunch' meetings like the one last night. What this does suggest is that there won't be another flood of letters calling for a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister, though the working theory remains that it is more likely that the threshold of 48 is reached by accident rather than as a result of a concerted campaign.

Given relations with her own party, Theresa May will have been far more worried about the second half of Prime Minister's Questions than the first. On the basis of the backbench questions that were asked, the session went pretty well. Only one Tory MP raised Brexit at all, and that was Jacob Rees-Mogg, who asked for assurances that the European Court of Justice would not get the final say on cases arising from the Brexit withdrawal agreement. May was able to tell the Chamber that this wasn't true - though the Sun's report this morning on the matter was pretty strong - and that was all for Brexit. Instead, her MPs asked a range of constituency-based questions and didn't cause trouble, which bodes well for tonight's 1922 Committee meeting.

Theresa May is to face her MPs at the 1922 Committee tomorrow, it has been confirmed. There had been calls for the Prime Minister to do so, after feverish speculation that Tory MPs were plotting to remove her because of her disappointing Brexit performance. She has clearly decided to take on those critics and face her party, rather than hide and hope that this is all going to go away. One of the reasons MPs are increasingly dissatisfied with the Prime Minister is that she isn't offering any sense of progress towards a deal, and there will again be demands for her to show that she will win a concession from Brussels and secure a deal.

The news that Chuka Umunna is getting paid £451 an hour to chair a new centrist think tank will go down very well indeed with some of his Labour colleagues. It's not so much that those MPs are just delighted for Umunna, as it is that they can use his £65,000 salary to undermine the chances of the new centrist party that this think tank might be working for. The Labour leadership is naturally worried about the idea of a breakaway centrist party, as it could rob Jeremy Corbyn of his chance to become Prime Minister at the next general election. But the Corbynite attack line against such a party being merely an establishment stitch-up is pretty good. And Umunna's new job plays perfectly into that attack line.

Another question to the Prime Minister today that's worth noting came from Labour MP Danielle Rowley on Universal Credit. She was asking not about the well-known problems with the roll-out of the benefit, but about a flaw with its very design: 'The Work and Pensions Committee heard evidence that the lack of automatic split payments for universal credit means that women are being trapped in abusive relationships. That absolutely disgusts me, but how does it make the Prime Minister feel?' Currently, Universal Credit is paid to the household as a whole. The problem with this is when one member of a couple is abusing the other, and controlling all their finances.

John Bercow has told friends he is to step down as Speaker, according to the BBC. This follows Dame Laura Cox’s report into bullying and sexual harassment of House of Commons staff which says the existing senior leadership team in the Commons - including the Speaker - are probably incapable of changing the current ‘toxic culture’. But this is not Bercow taking responsibility. In fact, he isn’t even announcing anything new. He will retire next June, which has been the plan since May of this year. James reported this in the Sun at the time, and it seems similar ‘friends of the Speaker’ have been speaking to the BBC again.

Oh, what a delicious twist in the internal bickering of the Labour party. Chris Williamson, an MP who has spent the past few months touring the country campaigning for the mandatory reselection of his colleagues - or, as he prefers to brand it, a 'democracy roadshow' campaigning for all MPs to go through an 'open selection' from their local party every electoral cycle - is being threatened with deselection himself. Williamson finds himself a target after launching into a row with the trade unions at last month's Labour conference. The unions blocked plans for open selections, and instead went for a change in the party's rules that makes trigger ballots against sitting MPs easier.

One of the things that the Tory conference taught us was quite how worried the party is about Labour. There was almost a Mean Girls-style obsession with talking about Jeremy Corbyn in speeches on the stage, including Theresa May’s own address at the end of conference, where she returned to the problems with the Labour Party a number of times. The Tories are right to be worried, and not just as a result of last year’s snap election. I understand that the reason Labour has decided to talk so much about the way capitalism has left certain voters behind is that recent polling carried out by the party found it had strong resonance with groups of voters who feel pessimistic about the future of the country.

Theresa May appeared comfortable on the conference stage today for the first time. It wasn’t just her Dancing Queen entrance or her references to the various nightmares that beset last year’s address. It was also that she was able to defend what she was doing with real passion and conviction.  She also offered a good dissection of the Opposition, claiming that it wasn’t Labour but “the Jeremy Corbyn party”, and contrasting the approach of today’s frontbench with that of Labour’s greatest figures such as Attlee and Callaghan.