The Tories have finally and definitively closed the door on any return Amber Rudd may have been hoping for, by opening candidate selections in her seat of Hastings and Rye. Before her expulsion she was in two minds about hopping to a safer seat for the next election anyway…

Ahead of an inevitable election, the Tories have also opened selections in

• Meriden – retiring Caroline Spelman’s seat
• Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner – retiring Nick Hurd’s seat
• Sevenoaks – retiring Sir Michael Fallon’s seat

Seats with an average majority of 18,365. Ripe pickings for prospective careerists, though you need to get your application in by this Friday…

Caroline Spelman has not been especially popular with grassroots Tories following her decision to add her name to the Cooper-Letwin Bill seeking to delay Brexit, despite insisting less than two weeks earlier that she was “clear that I want to see no further delay to the country leaving the EU”. Funnily enough trying to take power away from your own party’s government and hand it to an unaccountable group of cross-party MPs isn’t a popular move with your activists…

Under the Conservative Party Constitution, sitting Conservative MPs have to be formally re-adopted by their local Associations before each election, although the rules are slightly vague around the precise procedural details. Normally this is a formality but with many long-standing Tory members angry and upset with the actions of some of their MPs on Brexit they have become more contentious events…

Guido has got wind that senior members of Spelman’s Meriden Association are trying to sneak through her reselection on the quiet to avoid any objections from local members. Local sources say that pro-Spelman members of the local Association Executive have been working to put together a quorum on the sly for a meeting tomorrow lunchtime in order to rush Spelman’s reselection through without alerting the general membership. Surely local members should at least be given the chance to have their say?

Just two weeks ago Dame Caroline Spelman was busy insisting that she had absolutely no desire to delay Brexit, despite People’s Vote being so enthusiastic about her amendment they were running sponsored Twitter ads encouraging MPs to vote for it. Spelman even emailed a concerned local resident to “[make] it clear that I want to see no further delay to the country leaving the EU”:

Her constituents will therefore be surprised to see her name appearing as one of the leading sponsors of Yvette Cooper’s retabled Brexit-blocking Bill which explicitly forces the Prime Minister to extend Article 50. A strange way of trying to ensure that there is “no further delay” to Brexit…

During the Tory turmoil of the March recess, journalists calling up MPs’ mobile phones were met with a chorus of foreign dial tones. Some of the backbenchers briefing hacks from ski slopes at least paid for their holidays themselves. Crispin Blunt, Phillip Lee, Tim Loughton, Antoinette Sandbach and Caroline Spelman however enjoyed £2,500 worth of free ski passes courtesy of the Swiss Parliament. The alpine alliance bagged tickets to two of the world’s top skiing resorts, all paid for as part of the British-Swiss All Party Parliamentary Group’s Parliamentary Ski Week. Suspect that is one of the more popular APPGs…

In the headlines for the right reasons today, Caroline Spelman has spent the morning at the National Farmers Union conference in Birmingham. Guido’s cider drinking co-conspirator in the room reports that the Secretary of State for the Enviroment told the farmers that “responsible genetic modification” will be key to “sustainable agriculture in the future”.

Surely giving plants steroids is just cheating?