Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer has finally filled the women and equalities brief in his government with Bridget Phillipson and Anneliese Dodds. Phillipson is the minister for women and equalities, along with her role as Secretary of State for Education. Dodds is minister of state for women and equalities, and has also been appointed a minister of state in the Foreign Office. Starmer is trying to underline that this is a government with bags of experience even after 14 years of Labour in opposition This is an interesting move given how thorny this policy area has become in the past few years. Dodds is well-known within the Labour party for being much more in favour of reform of gender recognition processes – something gender critical feminists are concerned about.

Wes Streeting has just given a striking statement on arrival at the Department of Health and Social Care in which he announced that ‘from today, the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken’. Parties make campaign threats that there are ‘24 hours to save the NHS’, but this description of Labour’s sacred cow as ‘broken’ goes far beyond that. It recognises the seriousness of the situation for the health service and is a declaration of Streeting's intent to reform. Streeting has become health secretary during an existential crisis. Voters are still committed to the principles of free healthcare but increasingly losing satisfaction with the way the NHS tries to deliver that.

The SNP is having a very normal election: its first really normal one in a long time. It’s just short of a decade since the party nearly swept away all traces of other political parties in the 2015 election, leaving just three non-nationalist MPs in place. Many of the candidates who won back then are now in the fight of their lives to hold on.  In Scotland’s Central Belt, most seats are on what the candidates themselves describe as a ‘knife edge’. The various MRP polls are predicting Labour wins in many SNP constituencies, including my local ones of Livingston, currently held by Hannah Bardell, and Linlithgow and Bathgate, where Martyn Day is the MP. Both were first elected as SNP MPs in 2015.

Rishi Sunak isn’t lacking in energy as he goes into his final few days of election campaigning. He is, though, using that energy in some quite futile ways. He spent much of his interview with Laura Kuenssberg this morning arguing with the way she phrased questions and getting irritated that he wasn’t being given enough time to explain himself on key policy areas. That tetchy impatience – something Sunak never recognises in himself – has long been one of his visible flaws.  It isn’t necessarily the kind of visible flaw that puts voters off a prime minister. The problem for Sunak was not whether he had eaten enough breakfast and was a bit too hangry, but what he could offer up to voters as evidence that backing the Conservatives on Thursday is a good idea.

Junior doctors are back out on strike in England today, walking out this morning for five days. The timing of this particular strike is highly political, given medics will return to work just before polling day – but it is also highly pointless: something NHS leaders have been quick to highlight. The election campaign is the one period when no politician can resolve the dispute over doctors’ pay. Rishi Sunak is not going to change his mind and award the doctors the 35 per cent raise they have been demanding, but neither could he if he wanted to because of the election purdah rules. Labour, on the other hand, aren’t in power.

It’s pretty unusual to hear a minister speaking during this election campaign: other than Mel Stride, the rest seem to have gone to ground entirely, either because they want to save their own seats or because they don’t want to be associated with the campaign at all. So when Steve Baker popped up on Andrew Neil’s show on Times Radio this lunchtime, that in itself was pretty remarkable. The Northern Ireland minister then accepted that the Tory betting scandal looked ‘terrible’, and did not bother to defend the delay in suspending the two Tory candidates who are alleged to have placed bets on the election date.