Once again I was surprised to be the only Berkshire MP who bothered to turn up on Saturday to support the excellent Magistrates Court Mock Trial Competition featuring schools from across the county. It’s a shame my colleagues don’t show more interest in this fantastic event which, in a very real practical sense, teaches young people how the courts operate and helps them develop their reasoning and communication skills. The Magistrates give freely of their time and judge the teams, not on the verdicts but on the way they conduct both their defence and their prosecution cases. Obviously I was mainly rooting for Little Heath from Tilehurst (and a bit for Kendrick) but I’m sure Bulmershe School in Woodley and St Crispins in Wokingham would have liked to have seen their local MPs as well.

A little bit of history was made in Parliament this week, when when both the Government and the Opposition front benches in the Commons were defeated by a large margin by backbench MPs of all parties determined to wrest control over Commons business from the whips. The House was voting on the recommendations of the Wright Committee on Parliamentary reform, of which I was member. On the day of the big vote my job was to organise MPs to turn up and vote through a full package of reforms which would give MPs the ability to directly elect both the chairs and the members (by party) of the Select Committees of the House of Commons, and establish a Backbench Business Committee to give the Commons control over all non-Government business. All the key reforms went through in spite of the poorly organised opposition from the traditionalists in all parties. A start has been made in handing power back to the Chamber of the House of Commons which can only help to begin to restore trust in our political system.

Nowadays it’s rare for there to be much in the way of whipped business on a Thursday and so I was able to accept with relative confidence a mid-week speaking engagement in Reading with the local Council for Racial Equality. It was a debate on extremism and in what circumstances limits can be reasonably placed on free speech.

On Sunday we heard the ’shock horror’ allegations that the Prime Minister occasionally loses his rag with his civil servants prompting the Tory spin doctors to call for yet another inquiry in order to maximise perceived political embarrassment for the Government. It appears that Conservative high command lack any sense of irony as chief spinner for David Cameron is the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who an industrial tribunal has just found guilty of bullying himself!

As the general election draws nearer, there is even more to do than usual as the Government attempts to rush through the final bits of legislation before Parliament is dissolved, and the electoral fun and games begins.

It was off to surgeries again this weekend and Friday night’s drop-in session in Whitley threw up a host of issues. I managed to get away in time to have a late dinner with some of the Pakistani community leaders in Reading where we discussed the horrific murder of Asha Muneer. Saturday morning started early with another advice surgery in my constituency office, then it was off to the Mad Stad to see the mighty Reading Royals dump Burnley out of the FA Cup. Why oh why can’t they show this form in the Championship? After the game I went to visit the Muneer family who have been inundated with messages of support from across the community at this horrible time.

Members of Parliament chose to celebrate the New Year in a variety of different ways upon their return to Westminster last week. The Conservatives, in their much-vaunted “election launch”, issued a series of posters bearing the image of a slender looking Mr Cameron attempting to look like a serious statesman which, some uncharitable members of the media suggested, had been enhanced by a team of airbrushers. The spindoctors behind it could have done with airbrushing the message rather than the image, especially on the NHS, when it was the same David Cameron who wrote the last Conservative manifesto which would have made hospital patients pay for up to half the cost of their operations unless they were rich enough to go private!

The run-up to Christmas is a ridiculously busy time in my constituency office. As well as the usual seasonal engagements, there is the official Christmas card to be designed and printed along with my Annual Report to constituents listing what I’ve been up to both here in Reading and in Parliament. As it is my last report, I asked my staff to dig out some retro pictures of past campaigns and, to my horror, they uncovered a photo from 1987 of my first Parliamentary election with me sporting a “pudding bowl” haircut. I included it because also pictured was my good friend and Whitley councillor John Cook, who sadly died shortly after I was first elected to Parliament in 1997, along with the late Doris Lawrence, the former Mayor of Reading.

I couldn’t help being amused this week at the contortions that David Cameron and his spin doctors are going through to try and “de-posh” the Tory Party. Apparently Conservative candidates in Tory target seats have been told by “Dave” himself to shorten any double barrelled or posh sounding names to make them seem like ordinary folk. I see that Simon Radford-Kirby (Brighton Kemptown) now has dropped the Radford from his name and Scott Seaman-Digby, the Tories’ Commercial Director, now likes to be called Scott Digby in deference to his leader’s wishes.

I couldn’t help laughing at the pathetic whinging in last week’s Chronicle from the Reading Tories because none of their number managed to get themselves on the BBC’s Question Time audience when it was held in Reading. Luckily the Wokingham Conservatives were not quite so inept and managed to submit questions and apply for tickets in the normal way. Likewise local Labour party members, councillors and candidates here in Reading put their names forward and several were selected as part of the balanced audience that the BBC always seeks to assemble.