James Forsyth

As David says, the conclusions of the Saville Inquiry make for grim reading. One person with close links to the services who served in Northern Ireland just told me, ‘it is far worse than we expected.’ In the House, David Cameron’s statement on it was heard in subdued silence. It would be remiss not to say that David Cameron dealt with this situation as well as anyone could. There was no equivalent to Jonathan Powell’s disgraceful statement that ‘the war against Irish terrorism was not our war’. He pointed out the context of the event and the fact that it was very much the exception rather than the rule of the work of the British security services in Northern Ireland.

The announcement that Lord Trimble will join the Israeli review into the flotilla incident is a reminder that he has no role in the current government. Trimble takes the Tory whip and given that the party is not overly supplied with Nobel Prize winners, it is a bit of a surprise that no role has been found for him. In opposition, the word was always that relations between him and the new leadership of the Ulster Unionists, the Tories’ electoral allies in Northern Ireland, were not great. But the UUP leader has resigned since the election. Now, it may well be that Trimble himself is the obstacle. Even his admirers admit that he is not the easiest man in the world to get along with. Or, it might be that Trimble is a victim of the Coalition.

In this new world of Coalition politics, there is a difference between Conservative party policy and government policy. There are things that the Conservatives would like to do but can’t do because they didn’t win a majority. As Tim wrote this morning, this provides an opportunity for the Conservative parliamentary party to fill this gap. When the backbench policy committees of the 1922 are set up, they should start working on developing, detailed policy ideas rather than just critiques of Coalition policy. The Prime Minister should encourage this for three reasons. First, it would provide him with a series of possible options for the next manifesto.

The PMQs attack No 10 was expecting from Labour on the Coalition’s planned spending cuts did not materialise and today’s was another relatively quiet affair. It started with a minute’s silence in memory of those who died in the shootings in Cumbria. Harman asked one question on gun laws before moving on to the electoral roll and whether it is fair to redraw the boundaries on a roll that does not include three and a half million people. Harman would be on quite strong ground here except for the fact that the boundaries were redrawn under the last government using this electoral register, a point Cameron made.

The Scottish and Welsh Nationalists have managed to prompt the first Commons vote where one of the governing parties has to vote against its own manifesto. They have put down an amendment calling for Trident to be included in the SDR, which will be voted on at 10pm tonight. The Lib Dem manifesto commits the party to ‘Saying no to the like for like replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system, which could cost £100 billion. We will hold a full defence review to establish the best alternative for Britain’s future security.’ But the Coalition agreement states that the government will keep Britain’s nuclear deterent and says that the renewal of Trident should merely be scrutinised for value for money.

There’s been a lot said about Ed Balls’ Observer piece on immigration. But the most striking thing about it to my mind is that it shows that Balls has made the transition to an opposition mindset.   Take his proposal that ‘Europe's leaders need to revisit the Free Movement Directive’. This is classic opposition politics; suggest something that sounds good but it practically impossible. The other EU member states are unlikely to agree to agree to renegotiating this directive. But the Tories can hardly point this out; emphasising the UK government’s impotence when it comes to changing the rules of the game would hardly go down well with the Tory base. So Balls gets to make the weather on this point.

George Osborne’s Asia trip has now been rounded off with a meeting of the G20 finance ministers in South Korea and he is now heading back to Britain and his Budget preparations. The trip must be marked up as a success for Osborne. In its communiqué, the meeting implicitly endorsed Osborne’s two major moves since becoming Chancellor, cuts this year and the setting up of the Office of Budgetary Responsibility:  ‘We welcome the recent announcements by some countries to reduce their deficits in 2010 and strengthen their fiscal frameworks and institutions’ No one can doubt that the Tories have comprehensively won the argument for in-year cuts.