This article was written by Crispin for the Lower KingswoodResidents' Association Village News, Spring Edition, and tells you whathappens on an average day.

My diary is co-ordinated by my private secretary, Penelope Tay, which always involved choosing between competing priorities. Wednesday 5th December 2001 was a typical day. My first engagement was a meeting at 9.00 a.m. at the Home Office with Beverley Hughes, the Minister for Prisons and Martin Narey, the Director General of the Prison Service. This was a private meeting which had been simultaneously offered and requested following my more in sorrow than in anger approach with the Minister over the appalling mishandling of the change of role of Downview Prison, the northernmost outpost of my constituency, from housing male prisoners to female ones. The whole affair is a sorry saga and the story to date can be largely be followed on my website, www.crispinbluntmp.com but this was not a meeting that inspired confidence. The Minister was defensive and political and Martin Narey came across as a control freak who had become slightly unhinged. Instead of being able to make a series of constructive points, which is my usual objective when having meetings with Ministers in private on constituency issues and getting them to engage in a sensible discussion of the issues, the meeting degenerated. Perhaps this was hardly surprising as the Minister and Director General were enormously defensive given the consequences of Ministerial policy and the Director General's control of the service should have been anticipated. However, it was thoroughly disagreeable and it was the worst private meeting I have had with a Minister.

I returned to my office at 1, Parliament Street, Whitehall at about 10.00 a.m. and began work dealing with the morning mail, preparing myself for oral Northern Ireland Questions in the Chamber at 2.30 pm and for the debate I had obtained on Downview Prison the following day. At 11.30 a.m. I attended a meeting with Quentin Davies and the other members of the Conservative frontbench team on Northern Ireland, Lord Glentoran from the House of Lords and two advisers to discuss how we would handle oral questions that afternoon. Later on we were joined by Conservative backbench MPs with a particular interest in Northern Ireland to have a wider discussion of policy towards Northern Ireland and to brief them on the themes we would be following at oral questions so that their supplementary questions could reinforce our chosen line of questions.

The meeting ended with Quentin Davies and I going down to a local newsagent to buy a copy of GQ magazine in which Peter Mandelson had had the first of his regular columns published that day. It was about Northern Ireland and contained by implication a searing critique of the current Secretary of State. In all the piles of reading that MPs have to do, glossy style magazines are a luxury we happily usually do without. Happily on this occasion, however, it provided useful ammunition for the afternoon.

I then rang the Irish Embassy to speak to one of the diplomats there to discuss cross-border co-operation on smuggling, to discover that a major operation had been successfully carried out that morning. By coincidence, or otherwise, Labour MPs had packed the Order Paper with questions about the Government's efforts against organised crime a fortnight earlier. This confirmed me in my intention to ask my question at oral questions about the massive scale of the smuggling and the resources thus being made available for terrorist organisations that afternoon, but also to draw attention to this astonishing coincidence.

Lunch was sandwiches listening to a talk by Michael Brown, former Tory MP and now political columnist for the Independent, giving his views and taking questions on the future of the Party.

2.30pm saw me on the Frontbench alongside Quentin Davies for Northern Ireland Questions. Oral questions on each subject occur once a month and provide MPs with a chance to question Ministers in the Chamber on their subject but it has to be done on a question that has been tabled two week earlier. So two weeks earlier MPs had submitted written questions to the Table Office in the House of Commons and these are all put into a ballot. The MP who gets the first question in the draw has his question answered by the Minister and then has the opportunity to ask a supplementary and then the Speaker will call other MPs to put supplementary questions on that issue until he decides it is appropriate to move on to the next question and the next subject. On Northern Ireland question it is unusual for us to get beyond three or four subjects and my identified supplementary was on question 3. As an Opposition spokesman I can be assured of getting called by the Speaker having told him which subject I want to ask a question on. However, we didn't get round to answering question 3 until nearly the end of Northern Ireland questions at 3.00 o'clock when it would be time for Prime Minister's questions. The House of course is packed waiting for the Prime Minister and as the clock ticked 3.00 o'clock and Jane Kennedy's answer rambled on past 3.00 I thought she had successfully talked me out. It then became a matter for discretion for the Speaker as to whether he was to call me or move straight on to Prime Minister's questions. I caught the Speaker's eye and gave him the sort of expression that I hoped communicated the fact that I expected to be called and indeed was. In a packed Chamber I was able to make my suggestion that Minister's had crammed the Order Paper with questions about organised crime in the knowledge that there was an operation against organised crime being mounted. This suggestion was met with the warmth that I anticipated from opposite and made for a rather more high octane engagement with the Minister than junior spokesmen usually get. I then swapped places with Iain Duncan Smith who takes over for the rather more challenging matter of Prime Minister's questions.

At 3.30 pm I remain in the Chamber to hear the first part of the statement on affairs in the Middle East. This statement followed terrorist atrocities in Jerusalem and Haifa when 25 people were killed and 108 people injured. At 4.00 pm I went to meet Jerome Lynch, QC and Christ Wainwright, chairman of the East Redhill Residents Association in Central Lobby and we then repaired to my office to prepare and co-ordinate our presentations to the County Council's Planning Committee the following morning opposing proposals for an incinerator at Copyhold, Redhill. We worked for a couple of hours on our respective scripts making sure that we did not duplicate each other and rehearsing ourselves in the presentation we had to make collectively within twenty minutes. Our efforts were crowned with success when the following day the Committee found 14:O against the proposals.

The end of our preparation coincided with a vote in the House on a Government procedural motion to help ensure that the Terrorism Bill was completed before Christmas. At this stage the Government had still not agreed to our proposed changes to the Bill, which they subsequently did accept and so we opposed the Government on this motion. With other Conservative MPs I then went back to the 1922 Committee, the committee of all MPs to listen to Michael Howard address the committee. Following this I looked in quickly at the Chamber on the debate on how the European affairs was progressing, then happily able to make my way home at the unusually early time of 7.30 pm there being no 10.00 pm vote that evening. It is always a treat to enjoy Victoria's cooking rather than that of the House of Commons.