A morning run began the day. Into the Commons to find our regular Defence Committee meeting at 1000 was cancelled. Having bumped into Lord Cameron - we agree on very little - I met up with my parliamentary team to run through constituency matters. Plenty of correspondence to then deal with. I do try and write most of the replies in letter form. I am not a fan of email unless I have to. At 1500, I had tea with Liz Truss and a few other colleagues to chew the cud. Plenty to chew at the moment. Then, at 1700, I attended a private meeting of the ERG, which lasted most than an hour. The vote on the Media Bill never materialised so I then headed to the Defence Secretary's office for a drink. Mr Shapps is not a military man, but he's making every effort to keep colleagues with military experience in the loop and we all appreciate that alot. The inevitable leaks ahead of tomorrow's Autumn Statement were broadcast including the news that the minimum wage would increase by more than a pound to £11.44 per hour from April next year. We shall see. In a tragic story, the bodies of four teenagers were found in an upturned car. They'd gone missing after going camping in north Wales. Professor Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid inquiry that allowing mass gatherings in the early days of the pandemic was "logically incoherent" to the public and gave a false impression of "normality." Abroad, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel's war against Hamas would not stop, even if an agreement for a temporary ceasefire in exchange for the release of hostages was made. And, finally, in an extraordinary conversion, Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said: “For 30 or 40 years, there’s a kind of interpretation that is always in favour of the migrants . . . We have to rewrite something in the [EU] treaties or in the [European Convention of Human Rights]. We have to create a constitutional shield [allowing national law to take precedence], and to ask the French people to decide. The EU today is no longer the EU that the UK left. We have begun to draw the lessons of Brexit.” Maybe the EU is waking up at last, not least to the danger of uncontrolled immigration.