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.
The government has published its Charter on Budget Responsibility, which at one stage was supposed to be a Labour trap but which now appears to be something that Labour can have a bit of fun with. In his ‘black cloud’ economy speech this afternoon, David Cameron announced that the Charter ‘would have the structural current
David Cameron is talking about the ‘great, black, ominous cloud’ that Labour’s economic plans would put over the British economy. Labour is talking about its immigration policies while trying not to talk about a document that suggests it shouldn’t talk for too long about them. The Lib Dems are complaining that the Tories would damage
Theresa May will announce changes the Mental Health Act this week that mean mentally ill teenagers are never held in police cells when they should be in a hospital bed. As I reveal in The Times this morning, the Home Secretary will on Thursday publish a review of sections 135 and 136 of the Act
At least one armed gunman has taken ‘fewer than 30’ people hostage in a Sydney café. Here is what we know so far. Five people have escaped the café in the past couple of hours, with one male hostage in hospital in a ‘satisfactory’ condition. Reports are that between eight and 50 people are being
Oh look, Russell Brand doesn’t want to stand for Parliament even though he moans about it! You can watch the clip of the man who was introduced as a ‘comedian and campaigner’ on Question Time last night saying he would ‘be scared I’d become one of them’ here. Now, it’s easy to mock this ‘comedian
Unfortunately for Labour, it cannot dismiss Nigel Farage as a ‘pound shop Enoch Powell’ quite so easily as Russell Brand did last night. The party knows that Ukip can take the voters that have already deserted it – voters that it thought still belonged to the party – and there have been increasing calls for
There is a great deal of excitement around today about an interview that Channel 4 News did yesterday with some quite smug chaps who have set up something called a ‘Cereal Café’ in Brick Lane and are charging customers £3.20 for a bowl of Lucky Charms. To be honest, if I’d worked out a similar
Ed Miliband’s speech on reducing the deficit has attracted a fair bit of criticism for not telling us very much that’s new. It was supposed to be a Big Speech, and Big Speech normally means Big Announcement, but there wasn’t one. There wasn’t even really any bigger attempt to tell us what Labour would do
Labour has returned to a bit more of an even keel in the past few wintry weeks after a torrid autumn. Plotters are resigned to letting Ed Miliband fight the General Election on his terms, and given the closeness of the two parties in the opinion polls, most are concluding that a disorganised Labour party
When it comes to rows about the NHS, these days it doesn’t rain, it pours. In fact, fights between the parties about who cares more/privatised the most are turning into a weather bomb, such is their frequency. Today Nick Clegg turned up to Prime Minister’s Questions determined to highlight Labour hypocrisy on the health service,
British troops have now left Afghanistan, but the debate about the conflict itself and what happens next rumbles on. There have been a number of calls for a review of the conflict so that the government can learn lessons about what did and didn’t work – as well as what might happen next in the
One of the most striking stories in today’s papers – and on the front of one of them – is the claim made by Labour’s Emma Lewell-Buck that people on low-incomes are struggling so much with the cost of funerals that they are having to resort to burying them in their back gardens. Lewell-Buck was
Nick Clegg is taking Prime Minister’s Questions today, which will at least force the Lib Dem leader to turn up to a major Commons session, rather than bunking off to Cornwall. It’s not just good timing in terms of sorting out Clegg’s truancy rate, but also because Coalition ministers have been taking public pot shots
Today’s Treasury Questions was a bit odd, not least because neither George Osborne nor Ed Balls were there, so everyone seemed to be quite keen to get the thing over with. Labour’s latest line of attack is to force Treasury ministers into ruling out or obfuscating over whether or not a Tory government would put
Today’s conclusion from the British Election Study that Ukip will hurt the Tories far more than it will damage Labour at the General Election is unsurprising, but still important as its warning that the Conservative party could lose nearly two million voters to Nigel Farage’s party underlines the need for the Tories to find a
Two politicians unashamedly and eternally at one another’s throats are Jeremy Hunt and Andy Burnham, scrapping over who cares more about ‘Our NHS’. Today Hunt has written to Burnham complaining about a story in the Sunday People this weekend that 1,800 nurses have left the NHS in two months. Hunt is accusing Burnham of dodgy
Most people went into Work and Pensions Questions expecting Iain Duncan Smith to be in a tetchy fame of mind following this morning’s report on food banks. As a matter of fact, the Work and Pensions Secretary was very, very keen to tell us as often as he possibly could how ‘seriously’ he was taking
Frank Field just about managed to hold together a cross-party consensus on the need to tackle hunger in this country at the launch of the ‘Feeding Britain’ report. At the end of the launch, at which Justin Welby and all the politicians involved spoke, the Labour co-chair of the inquiry said brightly ‘there you have
After being too busy talking to ‘normal people’ in Cornwall last Wednesday and missing previous PMQs presumably to do the same, Nick Clegg will not only be attending this Wednesday’s session, he’ll be taking it. David Cameron won’t be around because he’s visiting Turkey this week, and so the Deputy Prime Minister will step into
It has been quite difficult for anyone following the growth food banks over the past few years to avoid growing dispirited. The debate in Parliament runs along the lines of the Tories pretending food banks and food bank demand don’t exist and Labour claiming that food banks and rising food bank demands are all the