Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s body language on leaving the European Council summit last night shows quite how much of a toll the past few weeks have taken on the Prime Minister. She looks exhausted. Now, you don’t have to feel sorry for May: she did, after all, decide to call the snap election that has proved to be her undoing - even though so many people thought she would be mad not to call it with the Labour party appearing to be so weak. But it is worth noting that the most important people in government - and the most important people involved in the attempts to keep the government together - are all totally exhausted and that this exhaustion inevitably has an impact on the way government works.

Today’s exchanges between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in the Commons following the Queen’s Speech showed how much difference confidence makes to a leader’s performance. While Corbyn will never be a scintillating orator - speaking for far too long and ending with a sentence that seemed to be aimed more at entering the Guinness Book of Records than at making any sense - he made the most of the opportunity that such a threadbare speech presented him with. The election result may not have delivered him into government, but it has made him look like far more of a winner than the woman who called the poll.

Tomorrow Theresa May will present a Queen’s Speech that doesn’t have the formal support of a majority of the House of Commons. Her negotiations with the DUP still haven’t concluded, with party sources this afternoon warning the Conservatives that they won’t be ‘taken for granted’ and criticising the way May and her team have conducted the negotiations. It’s almost as though the DUP know a thing or two about how to negotiate: certainly a thing or two more than Theresa May and her team. Party sources even dropped hints about the implications of these negotiations for May’s success in Brussels, hitting one of the most sensitive spots for the Tory leader.

Normally in the run-up to a Queen’s Speech, Westminster watchers wonder how radical the Prime Minister feels like being - and how much political capital they have available to spend. But of course this year’s Speech is rather different, because the Prime Minister has no political capital and the negotiations with the DUP haven’t concluded. Moreover, Theresa May has never given the impression that she wants to be particularly radical, even in her honeymoon days as the Prime Minister who gets things done. Her pitch in the election was to get a bigger majority so she could have a quiet life while carrying out the Brexit negotiations. She certainly hasn’t got a quiet life, and she will have to be even less radical than she’d initially planned.

What can Theresa May put in the Queen’s Speech next week? The Prime Minister was always a cautious sort who wouldn’t put anything before Parliament that didn’t have a sure chance of passing - and that was when she had a majority. Now, she firstly needs to propose a set of bills that the DUP will back her on in the Queen’s Speech vote and then again in the Commons when each individual bill goes through - or that Labour will support her on. And her party isn’t in the greatest mood at the moment, which will make for difficult internal battles over the detail of legislation, too.

Was Tim Farron's resignation as Liberal Democrat leader inevitable? He seems to suggest so, saying in his striking resignation statement that it felt 'impossible' to be a political leader and live as a committed Christian.  He spent much of the election campaign stuck in a strange political special of the Moral Maze, endlessly cross-examined about his beliefs on issues such as gay sex and abortion. He argued that religious beliefs are not relevant in a political context, telling Sky during the campaign that 'the measure of a Liberal is someone who protects other people's rights, no matter what your personal position is'. Many in his party admired him for this. Others, such as Brian Paddick, who resigned yesterday from a position few were aware he held, clearly did not.

Normally after an election, the leader of the party that came second comes to the first meeting of their parliamentary party and promises an inquiry into what went wrong. As Katy reported from the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting last night, no such thing happened when Jeremy Corbyn spoke to MPs. He received a standing ovation from all but two members, and the tone of the meeting was very much about how well Labour had done.  This is the dominant narrative: that Labour basically won the election by gaining seats, and the Tories lost it even though they remain the largest party. Politically, of course, Theresa May has lost: it was her decision to call an election and her campaign that cost the Tories seats.

What is Labour’s policy on Brexit? No one has ever really known the answer to this question, and it doesn’t seem to be any closer to being resolved now that the election is out of the way, either. Sir Keir Starmer yesterday attacked the government for ‘simply sweeping options off the table before they even started with the negotiations’, including saying Britain will not seek to be a member of the Single Market. But Jeremy Corbyn has said in the past few days that Brexit ‘absolutely’ means leaving the single market - a stance echoed by John McDonnell.

The reshuffle announcements keep rolling miserably on, with Theresa May congratulating herself on people bothering to answer the phone to her. One of the new appointments is rather odd. Anne Milton has had a promotion from the whips' office to the Education Department, which must be flattering for the sharp Guildford MP. But it's not clear why May has done it. The best whips are the ones you don't notice, and few outside Tory circles will have had much of an idea of how Milton works. But she is one of the most effective and respected whips in the party. This is valuable to any Prime Minister but especially to one who has managed to exhaust, infuriate and weaken her party in one fell swoop.

Labour's elections team expects the party to be left with just 140 seats after the election, The Spectator has learned. I understand from two very good sources that this working assumption developed by Patrick Heneghan, the party’s elections director, is based on the party’s private data. This could mean that 89 sitting Labour MPs lose their seats - and means the party considers previously safe constituencies to be at risk.  This internal prediction may well explain why Len McCluskey chose this week to set 200 seats as the sign of a ‘successful campaign’. Falling so far short of that threshold would give those on the Left who have previously supported Jeremy Corbyn an excuse to move against him after the election.

By the standards of a ‘normal’ election, the ITV televised leaders’ debate might have seemed like a bit of a waste of time. The most prominent politician present was Nicola Sturgeon, who is not standing in the General Election. But she does have some claim to opposition, given that her party is the most disciplined and effective form of opposition in Westminster at the moment (given the misery of Labour and the tiny Lib Dem presence). Tim Farron - who must have been relieved not to have to talk about gay sex, abortion or faith healing - was the most prominent Westminster-based party leader. Jeremy Corbyn was not present.

One of the complaints that allies of Jeremy Corbyn often issue is that his critics - whether in his own party, the media, the Tory party or the general electorate - tend to focus on the man, not his policies. His policies are, those allies argue, actually very popular with voters -- when you test them without mentioning either Labour or Jeremy Corbyn. Which seems to be proving rather difficult in this election. There are two problems with this. The first is that voters don’t give a fig about your wonderful policies if they don’t trust your party’s leader to be competent enough to enact them. Every Labour MP I have spoken to across the country says that the number one issue on the doorstep is Jeremy Corbyn.

Why do Conservative politicians love Ronseal so much? Theresa May tells today's Sunday Times that the Ronseal slogan - 'it does what it says on the tin' - is her 'political philosophy'. David Cameron spent years talking about Britain's yearning for 'a kind of Ronseal politics', before describing the Coalition government as operating according to the Ronseal principles. May's Ronseal branding seems to suit her better: A.N. Wilson describes her in this week's magazine as 'patently boring'. Ronseal's slogan was developed as an acknowledgement that it was competing against fancier brands in a crowded market, which isn't May's problem. But she has always styled herself as a woman who gets things done. Does the Ronseal brand really fit with May's policies?