Gavin Williamson is a hard act to follow as Chief Whip

Moving your chief whip when you’re in a minority government is pretty brave. In trying to work out who to replace Michael Fallon with at the Ministry of Defence, Theresa May was obviously going to have to consider who she trusted to be able to retain the job for as long as the previous occupant (Fallon was a few months short of becoming the longest-serving Conservative Defence Secretary in history), but trusting your chief whip when you don’t have the parliamentary numbers is important too.

But though Williamson had built up an image as an old school whip, boasting about the value of a ‘sharpened carrot’ in an unusual public speech at conference, and making it known (in a rather school-boyish fashion) that he had a pet tarantula, he hadn’t actually reached the biggest tests of his job. The EU Withdrawal Bill had been paused while ministers worked out what to do with it, and Tory rebels tell me that they only started hearing from those ministers and whips this week.