James Forsyth

The Tory backbencher James Duddridge has formally tabled a motion of no confidence in the Speaker John Bercow. Duddridge’s attempt to remove the Speaker follows Bercow’s outburst against Donald Trump from the chair on Monday, which further called into question his impartiality and his judgement. Duddridge’s motion is unlikely to succeed. The SNP and nearly all Labour MPs will back Bercow while the government has no appetite for getting drawn into this fight. The vote, though, will be an embarrassment to the Speaker. There’ll be a sizeable number of Tories who vote for it, 150 is the number being talked about tonight, and it will show how Bercow has lost the confidence of a section of the House. But Bercow is not the type to be embarrassed into standing down.

The drink will be flowing in the government whips’ office tonight. For the Brexit Bill has passed through the Commons unamended and with an absolutely thumping majority at third reading of 372. This means that a clean bill will go to the House of Lords. This will strengthen the government’s hand there as peers will be more reluctant to make changes to a clean bill and one that has passed the Commons with such a large majority. Despite all the talk of knife-edge votes, the government’s majorities tonight were pretty comfortable—30 or above on all the amendments.

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t going to become Prime Minister. But if the housing crisis isn’t solved, the next left wing populist could—I say in The Sun this morning. Home ownership has dropped to a 30 year low and homes are becoming increasingly unaffordable. In London the average house costs 11 times earnings. Without radical reform, the Tory idea of property owning democracy will wither and, eventually, die. The government’s housing white paper due out next week is meant to try and solve these problems. Councils will be told to come up with realistic views of the housing needs of their area that take into account the growing population. If government thinks that their plans don’t do this, councils will be ordered to redo them.

Imagine if Donald Trump declared that Islam had ‘no place’ in his country, or proposed banning the burqa ‘wherever legally possible’. There wouldn’t be enough space in Trafalgar Square for all the protestors. British ministers would be forced to the Commons to make clear their disagreement with the President of the United States. And there would be millions more signatures on the petition demanding that his state visit invitation be rescinded. The Trump White House, of course, hasn’t said either of these things. They are the on-the-record positions of two heads of governments in the EU.

Today should have been a good PMQs for Jeremy Corbyn. He had the chance to denounce Donald Trump and embarrass Theresa May over his actions, as Prime Minister she is—obviously—constrained in what she can say about the US president. But May had come well prepared and ended up besting Corbyn. She hit at his fundamental weakness, when she declared ‘he can lead a protest, I’m leading the country’. Perhaps, the most substantive moment of the session came when Corbyn asked for a guarantee that the NHS wouldn’t be opened up to US companies as part of a US / UK trade deal. May replied, ‘The NHS is not for sale’.

Boris Johnson came to the House of Commons to answer questions on the Trump visa ban with the opposition benches in full outrage mode. The policy is wrong, ill-considered and a blunt instrument. But those in the Chamber who see it as a sign the US is on the road to fascism are getting things out of proportion. As Johnson said you can see it as ‘divisive and wrong’ without resorting to 1930s parallels or wanting to disinvite Trump from his State visit. There were a series of irate questions from the Labour benches. Yvette Cooper demanded that Johnson ‘for the sake of history, for Heaven’s sake have the guts to speak out', Dennis Skinner called Trump a 'fascist' and Mike Gapes labelled Theresa May an ‘appeaser’.

Theresa May’s team will be basking this morning in the write-ups of her successful visit to Washington. As I say in The Sun this morning, the big prize for her is a US / UK free trade deal. Government ministers think that, given the political will on both sides, the deal could be negotiated in just eight months. There is also confidence in Whitehall that the US will be prepared to grant an exemption for public services which would ‘protect’ the NHS. This should do much to reduce the intensity of the opposition to the deal. Trump’s protectionist rhetoric is often cited as a reason why a US / UK deal won’t happen, or will be very limited.

The Trump / May press conference went as well as the Prime Minister’s team could have hoped. The new president was effusive about Brexit saying it was a ‘wonderful thing’, a ‘fantastic thing’ and declaring that it’ll be a ‘tremendous asset’ for the UK. He was also warm about May personally, predicting that their relationship was going to be ‘fantastic’ and opining that they had already hit it off.  Usefully for May, Trump also didn’t say anything outrageous, by his standards, at the press conference. In response to the BBC, he said that the US wouldn’t torture because Defence Secretary Mattis’s objections overrode his own personal belief that it worked.

Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead, has resigned from the Labour front bench over Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to impose a three-line whip on the Article 50 vote. Siddiq’s argument is that she doesn’t back triggering Article 50 and nor does her constituency, which voted heavily to Remain in the EU, and so she can’t support Labour’s official position on this issue. Siddiq’s resignation, the first Brexit front bench resignation, is a reminder that—as I say in my column this week — the Article 50 vote will be more politically difficult for Labour than the Conservatives.

It is one of the oldest tricks in the book: make news just before the leader of the opposition gets up at PMQs to wrong foot them. This is what Theresa May did to Jeremy Corbyn today, announcing that there will be a government white paper on Brexit after all. The Labour leader was clearly thrown by this, and never recovered. He ended up turning in one of his worst PMQs performances. Though, it is worth noting that May still hasn’t said when this white paper will be published. To make things worse, Corbyn began by offering condolences to the family of a policeman shot in Belfast at the weekend. The problem, as the DUP’s Nigel Dodds pointed out later in the session, is that the policeman hasn’t died and is in a stable condition in hospital.

‘No negotiation without notification’ has been the EU’s mantra since 24 June last year. Its leaders have been determined that there’ll be no talks before Britain has formally submitted its Article 50 letter, starting the two-year countdown to this country leaving the union. Even now, after Theresa May has set out her Brexit plans with a decent amount of detail, the EU is sticking to this line. Why? Because it wants Britain to be negotiating against the clock. Despite this, there have been informal conversations over the past six months that have helped forge the Brexit strategy that May set out on Tuesday.

Listen to Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth reviewing Theresa May's speech: Theresa May’s speech today was striking for how much it took off the negotiating table. Britain is, she said, leaving the single market. She isn’t going to spend anytime seeing if free movement - but only for those with a job - might be somehow compatible with single-market membership. She was also clear that the UK is quitting the EU’s common external tariff and commercial policy.  Why is May doing this? Well, staying in the single market with no say over the rules is, obviously, not a sustainable position—you couldn’t regulate the City of London by just cutting and pasting in EU rules.