Tony Blair continues to cast shadow over Westminster

Back to business today at Westminster with MPs returning to the Commons after a shorter-than-normal summer recess, writes John Hipwood. There's no time for slouching under the Coalition Government, you know.

It will be very much business as usual tonight when MPs vote on next May's proposed referendum on swapping the first-past-the-post system of electing men and women to the Commons for the alternative vote system, a sort of halfway house towards the Liberal Democrat goal of proportional representation.

Business as usual because Labour MPs will be whipped into going through the 'No' lobby despite the fact that theirs was the only party to actually propose a referendum on AV in the general election campaign four months ago.

The Labour 'leadership' has decided to vote against not, of course, because they are desperate to embarrass the Coalition by lining up with rebel Tories to try to block the referendum, but because they believe the Government is guilty of gerrymandering in cutting the number of MPs from 650 to 600.

David Cameron, who wants to stick with first-past-the-post, and Nick Clegg, who wants AV as a stepping stone to PR, described the Labour position as "opposition for opposition sake".

Tory MPs like Shropshire's Daniel Kawczynski, chairman of the Commons First Past the Post Group, are determined to block the referendum, which their leader has signed up to even though, come the campaign, he will be arguing against his deputy in government, Nick Clegg.

In other words, like most constitutional issues brought before Parliament, it's business as usual ­ complicated and confusing.

It will also be business as usual on Wednesday when Mr Cameron ritually trounces Harriet Harman at Prime Minister's Question Time.

Tony Blair, who was a master of the art, admitted in his memoirs last week that he was very nervous before every Question Time and even succumbed to the footballer-style superstition of wearing the same pair of shoes to each session.

Nervous or not, Mr Cameron is good at the despatch box too, making his jokes and ad libs sound spontaneous even if, like Morecambe & Wise, they were carefully rehearsed.

At the moment, however, the Prime Minister is enjoying a pretty easy ride because most of the time Miss Harman, Labour's acting leader, isn't capable of providing credible opposition. Nor, with Mr Clegg sitting next to him, does Mr Cameron face a second wave of questioning from a third party leader.

It was interesting to see all five of the Labour leadership contenders saying that the publication of The Journey last week was unhelpful.

Even the race favourite, David Miliband, who has the backing, albeit unsaid, of Mr Blair, distanced himself from his former boss. It's not fashionable just now to be linked to Labour's most successful ever leader.

Especially, that is, if you are in the Labour Party. Tories don't seem so worried about occuping the centre ground of politics which Mr Blair was so keen to occupy.

The ex-Labour leader made what initially sounded like a strange comment last week in his interview with Andrew Marr to co-incide with publication of The Journey.

"I don't want to cause trouble for David Cameron, actually," he said.

In Mr Blair's mind this wasn't a remotely strange remark because he believes that Messrs Cameron, Clegg & Co are in roughly the right place (his place), particularly on deficit reduction and in creating more academies.

This has led to accusations from some in the Labour Party that, like his dad, their former leader was a Conservative all along. Poppycock, but an easy way to explain some of the things that Mr Blair did in changing the Labour Party.

Mr Blair, himself, has long been aware that he is considered by many inside his party as something of a cuckoo in the nest.

So as soon as he became leader of the party in 1994, he acquired a Labour touchstone in former Staffordshire MP Bruce Grocott, who was his parliamentary private secretary throughout Mr Blair's period as Leader of the Opposition and for the first four years of his premiership.

In his memoirs Mr Blair describes the former Lichfield & Tamworth and later Wrekin and Telford MP as "the best of traditional Labour", and tells how he frequently had to argue about strategy with his parliamentary aide and another close adviser with 'Labour' written right through him ­ Alastair Campbell.

"One enormous benefit was that I always knew what the party was thinking by reference to what Bruce thought," writes Mr Blair.

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One of the would-be Labour leaders, Ed Balls, who has almost single-handedly led opposition to the Coalition Government during the summer, today renewed his attack on Education Secretary Michael Gove's drive for more academies, claiming that the policy was biased towards high-performing schools in less deprived areas.

Mr Balls said the policy was "elitist" and would give more funding to the best schools at the expense of the rest.

Mr Gove hasn't had the smoothest of rides at the, thankfully, renamed Department for Education, but, by gosh, he's keen.

And he's promised a White Paper in the autumn setting out some new ideas (cue general groan from the teaching profession) on how to improve secondary education.

One of them is the long overdue proposal to introduce what he calls an "English baccalaureate" designed to encourage teenagers to study a broader range of subjects at GCSE.

How many of us regret dropping certain subjects early on at secondary school because they didn't seem to fit in with the course chosen at the time?

A baccalaureate would mean students not only taking English and maths at GCSE, but a science, a modern or ancient foreign language and a humanity like history, geography, art or music.

Mr Gove said yesterday: "One of the concerns about the English education system (as opposed to the one in Scotland where he was educated) is that people's options are narrowed too early. We need to learn from other countries why we have fallen behind in the last few years educationally."

Quite so.