Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
In the past few minutes, Angela Eagle has pulled out of the Labour leadership contest, citing insufficient nominations in the race with Owen Smith. ‘I’m withdrawing from this race and supporting Owen with all of my enthusiasm and might,’ she told reporters in Parliament’s Central Lobby. This means that Labour now has its unity candidate
Theresa May’s first Cabinet meeting wasn’t accompanied by the kind of eye-catching announcement you would have expected from Tony Blair or David Cameron. Instead, the big news is that the new Prime Minister will chair three Cabinet committees on the economy and industrial strategy, exiting the European Union, international trade and social reform. This does
Labour MPs are currently nominating candidates in the party’s leadership contest to replace Jeremy Corbyn. The current Labour leader does not need any nominations, but as the challengers, Angela Eagle and Owen Smith do. A deal has been done between the candidates for the one with the least support to step aside from the contest
If you wanted evidence to support the repeated assertion from Labour MPs that Jeremy Corbyn cannot continue as Labour leader, today’s Trident debate offered it in cartloads. The vote, which had been promised in 2007 by a Labour defence secretary, is supposed to be about the renewal of the submarines that carry the nuclear warheads.
As Katy reports, Labour appeared rather divided at its leadership hustings today. Behind the scenes, Owen Smith does seem to be attracting the greater support, including defectors from Angela Eagle’s camp. Some of those around Eagle are upset that their party may be about to elect yet another man when a woman has had the
Theresa May’s new government gets to work today, and first to face the heat of the Chamber was the Communities and Local Government frontbench. Unfortunately, the Chamber turned out to be rather cool, as very few Labour MPs had managed to turn up, giving Sajid Javid and his team a rather gentler introduction to their
Nice is quiet today, moving a little slower than it was yesterday, but it still moves. There is a strange disconnect between the way a city that has fallen victim to an horrific terror attack looks on television, and how it feels to those moving around it. Even somewhere that has seen such a terrible
A lorry has ploughed into crowds celebrating Bastille Day by the beach in Nice; there are reports of at least 80 people killed. I am currently in the city, having watched the fireworks in the crowd on La Promenade des Anglais near the sea, where the attack took place. I was just walking home when the
Civil servants in the Home Office, even the senior ones, always felt a little nervous when walking towards Theresa May’s office. It wasn’t so much the meeting with the Home Secretary that they dreaded as the characters who lurked in the room directly outside hers. One senior official describes a typical scene: Fiona Hill, one
It was a rather cruel pathetic fallacy that the Prime Minister who had to resign early after creating a political storm by accidentally taking Britain out of the European Union gave his final speech from Downing Street under rumbling, rolling storm clouds. At one point, the wind whooshed back David Cameron’s hair and rain began
Theresa May takes over as Prime Minister this afternoon much sooner than she expected at the start of the week. First on her agenda is to appoint her Cabinet, which we are expecting to happen later today, but then the new Tory leader will have a great number of gaps to fill in when it
Labour MPs are becoming increasingly agitated about the amount of abuse and intimidation they are receiving, to the extent that the party’s chief whip has complained to Jeremy Corbyn and written to the head of Corbynite group Momentum to seek assurances that it is cracking down on bad behaviour in its ranks. Rosie Winterton has
David Cameron has chaired his last ever, emotional, Cabinet meeting this morning, with just a final Prime Minister’s Questions lying between him and freedom. He may want to follow the example of Tony Blair and have a memorable sign off such as ‘and that is that, the end’, though it’s not clear whether he’ll find
As well as all the other things that Labour MPs are anxious about at the moment, there is genuine anxiety in the party today that some MPs are considering splitting off to join a new, moderate group in politics. Certainly Labour MPs are pretty miserable about the state of their party – and about the
Chris Grayling has given this very brief statement on behalf of Theresa May in the past few minutes: ‘Can I start by thanking on behalf of Theresa May and on behalf of everyone involved in Theresa’s campaign team by thanking and paying a warm tribute to Andrea Leadsom. Her actions this morning have shown what
Andrea Leadsom has withdrawn from the Tory leadership race, saying ‘the best interests of our country are best served by the immediate appointment of a strong and well-supported Prime Minister’ and that she did not have sufficient support to lead a strong and stable government. She said Theresa May was ‘ideally placed’ to implement Brexit
Jeremy Corbyn was insistent this morning on the Andrew Marr Show that he isn’t going anywhere. More than that: he insisted that Labour is ‘changing the way politics is done’. His opponents in the party would agree, as it happens. Corbyn is going nowhere, certainly not anywhere near to Number 10, but also nowhere near
Finally, the Labour coup is about to begin. Or at least, Labour MPs are talking about the fact that the Labour coup is about to begin, after weeks of threatening it. After talks between the party’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson and Labour’s trade union backers broke up today, Angela Eagle has said she will launch
One of the rules of modern leadership contests is that at some point there is an almighty row about whether one of the candidates is just better than the other because she happens to have had children of her own. Labour reached that stage on 6 July 2015 when Helen Goodman wrote a piece saying
Things have gone mysteriously quiet in the Labour party. Every so often, Len McCluskey and Tom Watson emerge from a meeting, asking their comrades to give them a little bit more time before any of them move against Jeremy Corbyn. And nothing seems to happen. How much more time do the plotters need to give