Isabel Hardman

Should Labour have courted Russell Brand more than a decade ago? And should the party apologise now that he has been jailed for rape and sexual assault? Ed Miliband’s interview with the now convicted comedian came up at Prime Minister’s Questions today when Kemi Badenoch said Miliband ‘thought cosying up to Russell Brand would make him prime minister’ and ‘I don’t think we need to trust his judgement’. Labour frontbenchers, including Miliband, have been under pressure to apologise for that interview from opponents who claim that Brand’s predatory behaviour was in plain sight even back in 2015.

Andy Burnham has today completed another rite of passage for modern prime ministers: trying to persuade doctors not to go on strike. Consultants in England are due to walk out on 25 and 26 November in protest at the government’s failure to engage in ‘genuine negotiations’ on their pay, and the Prime Minister was asked about it during a hospital visit. He replied: ‘I would say it’s not a case of “dig in”; more a case of, “let’s get back around the table”. There’s always a conversation to be had about how we can address the concerns, but address them in other ways. I’m not saying the thing that politicians often say about there being no money, but it’s just a fact, we have eked out what we could at the budget for the NHS.

Is Tony Vaughan a bully or not? If you'd listened to the Labour MP for Folkestone and Hythe's personal statement in the House of Commons last week, you might have concluded not. Vaughan was forced to give that statement by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, after he was found to have breached parliament’s bullying and harassment policy in the way he treated a member of staff.

Louise Haigh’s first outing as Andy Burnham’s stand-in at Prime Minister’s Questions today was assured and pretty successful. She looked like she was enjoying herself towards the end of her sparring with Alex Burghart, who has now racked up a good few sessions on the Tory side, and was clearly even more comfortable. But the way the questions went did still serve to highlight the trouble coming for this government on welfare. Burghart asked the same thing repeatedly, but with slightly different permutations, and Haigh wasn’t able to give much of an answer, other than that this government really is committed to bringing the benefits bill down. When it might manage that, or how, weren’t details she could offer.

The Conservatives should be landing some pretty painful hits on Labour at the moment, given the Budget has gone down as a piece of irrelevance, and the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood yesterday had to water down her immigration reforms. But instead, the Tory party is still struggling with its own recent legacy on both the economy and migration, which means Labour frontbenchers are having a much easier time. Take Treasury Questions in the Commons today. When the session moved to topical questions, shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith asked Chancellor John Healey about the likelihood of the Bank of England putting up interest rates next week. He demanded: ‘Will he now admit that it is his failure to get a grip on borrowing that will be causing rates to rise?

Kemi Badenoch had an annoyingly good Prime Minister’s Questions today: annoying for her, because no one will remember it. The scrap between the party leaders before the Budget is always overshadowed by the fiscal event that follows immediately afterwards, but the Tory leader made good use of it anyway. She focused all her questions on Andy Burnham’s confusion over Britain’s relationship with the European Union.  Badenoch opened by asking whether the Prime Minister wanted a referendum on rejoining the EU, to which Burnham replied that the ‘red lines’ in his party’s 2024 manifesto would remain.

Do MPs really care about parliament? Last week, the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle erupted in fury over Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh’s failure to announce the government’s decision on Jackdaw to the House first – an explosion the Speaker has been building up to for a while. Hoyle was frustrated by the way the Keir Starmer government often did this, and seems not to have reset his fury for Andy Burnham. Presumably he will be happier this week that the Budget has not already been live-blogged by ministers prior to John Healey standing up. What might be harder to shift, though, is the attitude that many MPs have developed towards the Chamber. MPs are always going to work hard.

Andy Burnham had a reasonably easy Prime Minister’s Questions today. He didn’t produce any embarrassingly quotable slogans about national security not coming at the expense of social security, and neither did he appear particularly flummoxed by any of Kemi Badenoch’s attacks. The Conservative leader appeared to be enjoying herself as ever, but so was Burnham, who once again had some decent jokes about his opposite number. Badenoch opened her questions by telling the Commons that last week she had asked the Prime Minister to ‘stop faffing about’ and approve the Jackdaw gas field.

Andy Burnham was already notorious before he became Prime Minister for flip-flopping, but what was less obvious until recently was how much that flip-flopping is caused by his habit of shooting from the hip initially. He says something on the spur of the moment, then finds himself having to row back because it turns out that once you're in Downing Street, everyone pays attention to your every word. He spent the end of this week insisting that he was absolutely clear on Scottish independence, having been anything but earlier in the autumn.

British healthcare moves in pendulum swings between one extreme and another, often without much material improvement for patients. Just look at how maternity care swung from mostly at home and assisted by midwives before the start of the NHS, to highly-medicalised and doctor-led by the 1960s, and back to a focus on ‘normal birth’ and reducing caesarean rates in more recent years. Very little of that has really helped the women and babies at the centre of the debate. The same is true in mental health, where we have swung from institutionalisation to care in the community without proper resourcing for either, and from stigma and silence to social normalisation, all without many material improvements for the people suffering from severe conditions.