James Forsyth

Walk down a corridor in the Palace of Westminster today and you’ll likely be taken aside by a Tory backbencher who wants to vent their frustration about Britain opting back into the European Arrest Warrant. At the moment, the mood is of concern rather than rebellion — a reflection of the fact that Tory MPs are in a fairly positive frame of mind after a good couple of political weeks for the party. But what should alarm Downing Street is that it isn’t just the usual Eurosceptic crowd expressing concern. Indeed, some of those who are most concerned are those who David Cameron has relied on recently to defend his European policy. Off the record, Number 10’s view is that with Theresa May’s help they can avoid a full-on row.

When a political party repeatedly uses an attack line it is nearly always because their polling shows that it works. This is certainly why the Tories keep calling Ed Miliband ‘weak’. Indeed, they’re so keen to keep hitting him with this charge that they’ve stopped accusing him of knifing his brother for fear of undercutting it. This is one of the many things that makes Miliband’s speech tomorrow so important. The Tories are desperate to portray Miliband as a weak leader being pushed around by the ‘bully boys’ of the trade union machine. If Miliband is seen to have ducked the issue, the Tories will have yet more ammunition for their ‘weak, weak, weak’ attacks.

The coalition parties have governed together for more than three years now, but they remain culturally very different beasts. When the Liberal Democrats held an away day last week, it was at a conference centre in Milton Keynes — picked, in the words of one Lib Dem, ‘because there are no distractions there’. The Tories are also conducting a bonding exercise: in the Downing Street garden and the chamber of the House of Commons. No. 10’s decision to light the barbecue and put out the bunting for Tory MPs is typical of its new-found interest in party management. It had realised that it was in danger of a vote of no confidence through neglect of its MPs, and it is now trying to correct its past errors.

Theresa May’s statement in the Commons today on stop and search strikes me as an important moment. Here, we had a Tory Home Secretary standing up and saying that she understood why some communities felt that stop and search was used unfairly and announcing a review of it. This is, as I said on Sunday, is quite a change in Tory attitudes. William Hague, who was Tory leader at the time, criticised the Macpherson report for making police reluctant to use stop and search. Just five years ago, David Cameron was emphasising the need to ‘free the police to do far more stopping and far more searching’. Now, May doesn’t want to scrap stop and search. But her concerns about its use are a reminder that Tory modernisation is not finished yet.

Liberal Democrat leaders are used to having to do more to get noticed than the other party leaders. But it is still striking just how much the Deputy Prime Minister is doing to try and inject himself into the national conversation. Joining Nick Clegg's weekly phone-in on LBC is a monthly press conference. One of the reasons Clegg is doing all this is to try and drain away the anger created by the compromises of coalition and, specifically, the broken promise on student fees. After 23 press conferences, even the lobby will tire — or so the Lib Dems hope - of asking Clegg about the U-turn on tuition fees, the shifting position on the EU referendum and the rest.

Michael Gove is not the only minister to be frustrated by the poor quality of letters drafted for his signature. One minister was horrified to find his reply to the Prime Minister starting ‘Good to here from you’. Another complains that his name is still spelt wrong, three years after he started in the job. But Gove is, probably, the only one who would send a memo to his ministers and civil servants urging them to read ‘George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot, Matthew Parris and Christopher Hitchens’ to improve their prose.’ The memo contains, what he dubs, Gove’s Golden Rules for writing a letter which I’ve reproduced in my Mail on Sunday column. But the introduction to these rules is also well worth reading.

Friday’s vote on James Wharton’s EU referendum bill is going to push the whole Europe question right back up the political agenda. The Tories will try and use it to highlight their support for a vote and the opposition of the other major parliamentary parties. It will be very hard for Ed Miliband to go into the next election opposed to a referendum. It would look like he was opposed to giving the public a say. I also suspect that it will become almost politically impossible to oppose a referendum after the European Elections in 2014. Patrick Wintour reports today that Labour is toying with the idea of either amending the Wharton Bill to back an instant In / Out vote or committing to one within the six months of the next election.

One thing that was noticeably absent yesterday was Tory crowing about Labour having signed up to the coalition’s current spending plans. Instead, George Osborne’s response to Balls concentrated on whether Labour would borrow more. Given the Osborne-Balls relationship, you might have thought that the Chancellor would have relished the idea that Balls had been forced into an intellectual surrender. But the Tory leadership is acutely aware that going on about Labour having accepted their spending limits undercuts their argument that it is the same old Labour party, addicted to spending and borrowing. So instead they’ve chosen to argue that Labour’s pledges of fiscal rectitude simply aren’t credible.

listen to ‘Spending review 2013: the Coffee House analysis’ on Audioboo The Liberal Democrats insisted that they wouldn’t accept any more welfare cuts. But George Osborne still found a way to put welfare at the centre of his statement today as he sought to put, what he calls, the ‘welfare party’ on the back foot.  It was a reminder that he remains a thoroughly political Chancellor. There were a series of tough conditionality measures. The most headline-grabbing of these was that the around 100,000 people who claim JSA but aren’t proficient in English will have to learn the language or lose their benefits. The state, though, will pay for their language lessons.

David Laws’ decision to hand Liam Byrne’s infamous ‘there’s no money’ note to ITV  is intriguing. It suggests that the Liberal Democrat leadership intend to escalate their attacks on Labour. Laws must know the power of this image. For when he first mentioned it at an early Osborne/Laws press conference, Andy Coulson pushed hard for an image of the actual note to be released. Coulson calculated that the note would have made nearly all the front pages and established the image of Labour profligacy in the public’s mind. But Laws, slightly taken aback by the level of interest in the note, refused to hand it over. At the time, friends of Laws said that he felt that putting the actual note itself out there would have been a bit below the belt.