Image source, PA

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani has arrived in Downing Street to meet with Theresa May.

The Italian conservative was elected as president in January.

The European Parliament has the power to block or amend EU laws, and will have the final say on whether to approve a Brexit deal with the UK.

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Nick Pearce, professor of public policy at the University of Bath and former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under Gordon Brown, told the programme: "When you’re in government you can rest on the things that your government has done, the things you have been developing.

"When you’re in opposition of course, you don’t have that work of government, you have to develop it yourselves.

"And of course it’s really important you have a credible programme for government, you need big arguments, big themes, the changes you want to see. But also it has to be a programme you can deliver.

"And it’s a disaster if you promise things you can’t deliver or worse still promise things that you don’t want to deliver, as the liberal democrats did in 2010 with their tuition fee manifestio."

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Sir Oliver Letwin, former Tory cabinet minister and co-author of Conservative manifestos since 2001, told Today: “It very much depends on the situation your party is in at the time of writing your manifesto.

"In 2015, there was an established government, it had a programme… it was a question of moulding it and changing it to be somewhat different programme to what had been followed.

"Whereas in 2010, when we were writing a manifesto to move from opposition into government, it was the setting out of a whole new programme, which we had spent five years developing.

"The interesting case this time round is probably the Labour Party manifesto… they have got a very, very short time to put together a complete programme and that is quite a challenge.”

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Nigel Farage says he is yet to decide whether to stand again for election as a UKIP MP. The MEP said he needed to weigh up where he is best placed to have an impact on Brexit. 

The former UKIP leader denied infighting in his party. He said divisions within have been healed and new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall has "six weeks to prove himself".   

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Ms Thornberry said: "I think they should view him (Jeremy Corbyn) as someone who wants to stand up for the vast majority of people...

"We will not be looking to the interests of hedge fund owners… we will be thinking of those whose average earnings are £26,000."

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Emily Thornberry, shadow foreign secretary, is on Today.

She tells the programme: "We have six weeks and what we are positive about is we are now going to get a proper hearing.

"I think that most people feel that the elite has not been taken on.

"What I mean is people who don't think the rules apply to them… I think they mean people who think it is appropriate to keep their wealth offshore.

"It’s about time that stopped."

BBC Newsnight

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

The Culture Secretary Karen Bradley has strongly defended her party's commitment to aid spending. 

Her comments come amid mounting speculation the pledge to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid could be dropped in the Tory manifesto.   

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Image source, EPA

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage told Radio 4's Today programme: "I haven’t decided [whether to stand] I still have to weigh it up.

"I have got to weigh up where am I best to be in terms of having an impact in Brexit."

He said he would decide "over the next couple of days".

The Times

Former Labour MP and Jeremy Corbyn ally Bob Marshall-Andrews has defeated to the Liberal Democrats, the Times has reported, external. 

Mr Marshall-Andrews, who was MP for Medway for 13 years from 1997, denounced the “abject failure of the Labour leadership” over the EU referendum campaign.

The newspaper reports that he said his former party was a "political basket case".

Image source, PA

1,727 people were interviewed online for The Times, external

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Prof Patrick Sturgis chaired the British Polling Council's report into what went wrong during the 2015 election, when pollsters failed to forecast the outcome of the general election.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the investigation had found it was largely due to “unrepresentative” poll samples.

"Polling for elections is a tremendously difficult thing to do. There is a lot of things that can go wrong,” he said.

“We were left with unrepresentative samples as the main problem.”

The polling industry predicted a virtual dead heat, when the Conservatives ultimately went on to outpoll Labour by 36.9% to 30.4%.  

A panel of experts concluded this was due to Tory voters being under-represented in phone and online polls.

But Prof Sturgis said he believes that this time it was “easier, if we believe the polls as they are now” with the Conservatives 15 to 20 points ahead.

“It is not looking like a very competitive election,” he said.

Chris Mason
Political Correspondent

Normally manifestos - the collection of promises that political parties dream up - are months, even years in the making.

Here, the political parties have to cobble something together in the best part of a week, 10 days, a fortnight.

So what we’ll get is a lot of promises we are likely to be familiar with.

The Conservatives, for instance, are likely to promise that if they are elected they will take the UK out of the single market, away from the courts of the European Union. As they will put it - they will get on with Brexit and will do what they have already been saying.

But from their perspective they hope to have a bigger majority to do it.

A whole blizzard of promises to come our way in the coming weeks.