Isabel Hardman

Chris Williamson’s resignation from the Labour frontbench shows that the party isn’t just a protest movement any more. The staunch Corbynite found himself the focus of Tory campaign graphics this week after suggesting that council tax should be doubled on some of the highest-value properties.  This afternoon, Labour confirmed that their Shadow Fire Minister had stepped down. Williamson said: ‘I will be standing down from my role with immediate effect so that I can return to the backbenches, where I will be campaigning on a broader range of issues. I will continue to loyally support the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn from the backbenches and hope to be a voice for the party’s members.

As with most reshuffles, today’s is being viewed largely as a test of the Prime Minister’s strength. Will she move the ministers who aren’t working well in their current posts? Will she underwhelm with what she eventually manages to do? Will she accidentally appoint Chris Grayling to another job for 30 seconds? So far, that test of strength isn’t going so well, with the attention largely focusing on deleted tweets and people getting out of cars. It’s easy on reshuffle day to forget the impact that moving ministers around has on government.

Given everything that happened to her in 2017, Theresa May could be starting this year in a far worse position. But that’s not to say that she hasn’t started in in the best position in the circumstances, either. That the Prime Minister and her team recognise this seemed apparent from her decision to pre-record her Andrew Marr interview, rather than appear live and chance being asked about new awkward stories in the Sunday papers. Perhaps booking a pre-recorded interview is a sign that Number 10 has a bit more of a clue than it did in the months after the snap election, but only really in the sense that it has more of a clue about how to better identify the Prime Minister’s political weaknesses.

Will Theresa May really go for a wide-ranging reshuffle in the next few weeks? Westminster wisdom has long been that it is dangerous to move your top team around, as sacked ministers make troublesome backbenchers. This does ignore the inconvenient truth that most of the trouble that May has faced over the past few months has come from within her Cabinet - albeit with an extra helping of Brexit rebels on the Conservative backbenches too. She is understood to be deliberating over whether to appoint a direct replacement for Damian Green as First Secretary of State, though even if she scraps that role, there is still a hole to fill at the Cabinet Office and on the various powerful committees delivering policy from Brexit to social care.

Damian Green has resigned from the Government following an investigation into his conduct. Below are the letters between the former First Secretary of State and the Prime Minister:   May makes clear in her letter that she asked Green to resign - but it’s worth noting what the resignation was for, as the investigation into his conduct focused on two aspects. The summary of the Cabinet Secretary’s report on these allegations, which was released to the media this evening, says that it was ‘not possible to reach a definitive conclusion on the appropriateness of Mr Green’s behaviour with Kate Maltby in early 2015, though the investigation found Ms Maltby’s account to be plausible’.

Brexit could split the Tory party. So many people wrote articles arguing this before and after David Cameron called the EU referendum, but it was generally assumed that the split would involve disgruntled eurosceptics claiming they had been betrayed after Britain voted to stay in the bloc after all. It was also generally assumed that the split would at least involve something quite serious. But today MPs are locked in a war of words over whether or not they should get a ‘meaningful’ vote on the final Brexit deal. Those in favour defeated the government last night: Theresa May’s first serious Commons defeat since the snap election.

The government has just been defeated in the House of Commons on whether the final Brexit deal will get a ‘meaningful vote’ by Parliament. MPs voted 309-305 to pass the amendment to the EU withdrawal bill by Dominic Grieve. There were dramatic scenes in the Commons, as MPs had initially believed that the government had won. This was based on the way one of the tellers for the rebels was standing in the Chamber (the tellers are MPs who announce the result, and they stand according to whether the Ayes or Noes have it). Heidi Alexander only moved to the other side of the floor at the very last minute, revealing that there had in fact been a government defeat.

Tory MPs are now sufficiently worried about the changes to the way that refuges for domestic abuse victims are funded that they have started to speak out publicly. This morning, in a Westminster Hall debate, three Conservative backbenchers told the Communities and Local Government minister Marcus Jones that the government ‘must intervene’ to stop refuges closing as a result of these funding changes. Sutton and Cheam MP Paul Scully, Bolton West MP Chris Green, and Ochil and South Perthshire MP Luke Graham all expressed concerns about the new funding model. Both Scully and Graham described how members of their own families had been victims of domestic violence.

Despite the government reaching its long-awaited milestone of ’sufficient progress’ in the Brexit talks last week, certain key figures on both sides of the debate seem intent on muddying the waters as much as possible. Mr Steerpike reports on David Davis’s latest efforts on that front, while Labour MPs are trying to understand the implications of Keir Starmer’s latest utterances on their party’s Brexit position.

In the midst of the confusion over whether the UK and Ireland have agreed for Northern Ireland to remain in the customs union, Tory MPs have been invited to a party meeting this afternoon at 4. Some backbenchers who are particularly interested in scrutinising Brexit had requested that they be given the same sort of off-the-record briefings on policy and developments as are offered on a regular basis by the Ministry of Defence, so this may well be one of those meetings. But the presence of Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of staff, suggests that it’s not just an off-the-record update from Brexit minister Steve Baker.

Nobody said Brexit was going to be easy, did they? It turns out that even talking about how difficult Brexit is going to be is pretty tricky, and the person feeling that most keenly is David Davis. Today the Brexit Secretary came under fire from all parts of the House of Commons for the heavy editing of some impact assessments on Brexit which it wasn’t entirely clear had ever actually been written in a form long enough for them to be edited down. Last year, Davis told MPs that ‘we’ve carried out or are in the midst of carrying out about 57, I think, sectoral analyses, each of which has implications for individual parts of 85 per cent of the economy, and some of those are still to be concluded.