Another day of intrigue and meetings, with the Rwanda Bill going through just after 1900. The day began with a group calling themselves the New Conservatives having breakfast with the Prime Minister. We learnt later that this had not gone well, with a testy Mr Sunak refusing to back down on a Bill that many of us thought was flawed. At 0930, I headed to the Macmillan Room for another session of our Defence Committee. My phone rang just before it started and a Home Office spokesman told me that a migrant on the Bibby Stockholm barge had taken his own life. This was very sad and I immediately contacted my colleagues at Dorset Council to see if they'd heard the news. They had. Knowing there'd be press and media interest, and stuck in the committee meeting, I asked one of my team to prepare a statement. Our Defence meeting began at 1030. We had four witnesses: David Williams, Permanent Secretary, MoD; Tom Wipperman, Director Strategic Finance, MoD; Adrian Baguley, Director General Strategic Enablers and Deputy CEO at Defence Equipment & Support; and Lieutenant General Rob Magowan, CB CBE Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Financial and Military Capability). The aim of the session was to examine the Ministry of Defence’s Annual Report and Accounts 2022–23. You can watch the two hour session on Parliament TV. As soon as it was over, I dropped down to Central Lobby for interviews with local BBC and ITV. Then I joined my parliamentary team in the dining room, where I gave them lunch and thanked them for all their hard work. The debate on Rwanda dominated the afternoon, with MPs on both sides of the argument making their views plain. At 1715, I joined colleagues in the Wilson Room for a final meeting before the vote. This was in private. The vote came at about 1915 and the Government won it comfortably, with many abstentions. I was one of those, after we'd agreed this was the best course of action to warn the Government that it must amend the Bill to make it workable. The press and media had done a good job in hyping up this disagreement, which was not one of direction, but implementation. The evening ended with a sigh of relief all round. In other news, five men were arrested and charged in connection with alleged historical abuse incidents at an independent school in Edinburgh. All football leagues in Turkey were suspended after a referee was punched to the ground by a club president following a top-flight game. And three young men who died in a crash involving a bus and a car in a village in south Wales were named.