With two votes on Thursday afternoon, the House of Commons finished debating the EU Withdrawal Bill. The Bill now goes to the House of Lords for their consideration, but it’s now almost a certainty that we will be leaving the EU on 31 January 2020.

I’ve now voted 14 times in the House of Commons - and every single one was to deliver the manifesto commitment that I stood on: to get Brexit done.

Voting in the Commons is a very strange affair. You have seven minutes to cram into a voting lobby (a posh corridor) before shuffling down to a clerk, telling them your name, and registering your vote. One corridor is to vote for the motion (the Aye lobby) and one is to vote against (the No lobby).

Like many rituals in the House of Commons, the act of doing it feels both momentous and also vaguely ridiculous. As you’re tramping through a crowd at 10pm to vote, you can’t help but wonder whether doing so by email or text might be better. But then you rub shoulders with the Health Secretary and have an opportunity to strike up a conversation about dental provision in Furness, and you realise why it’s valuable.

But politics goes on.

Since those votes, I’ve had many messages and tweets asking why, in voting for Brexit, I’ve denied people the right to study in Europe under the Erasmus scheme, or denied child refugees the right to join their families, or why I support watering down workers rights.

The answer is that I don’t.

The WA commits us to Erasmus+ until it naturally comes to an end in 2021 and we have stated that we hope to be involved in the successor programme that follows it.

And as the PM stated in the Chamber, in writing and on TV, we remain absolutely committed to re-uniting families and protecting refugee children. That commitment will be enshrined in the upcoming Immigration Bill.

In many areas we already go over and above the EU requirements on workers rights and it’s simply not in our interest to water them down or reduce them. They will be protected in the Employment Bill, scheduled for later this year.

In a job that has a very steep learning curve, this has been a crucial lesson for me - that the opposition will table amendments that they know don’t belong there, and that will be defeated, purely to make headlines. All while voting against Brexit again, as they did again on Thursday afternoon.

I voted against those amendments, not because I disagree with their aims but because they don’t belong in a Bill about Brexit. But also because the issues that they’re focussed on are already commitments by this government and will be enshrined in other laws.

Perhaps naively - almost certainly naively - I had hoped that the campaigning politics of the election would end when we got into Parliament, but sadly not. It’s perhaps a useful lesson to us all to consider that there’s generally two sides to every story.