Isabel Hardman

An ugly Prime Minister’s Questions today which will probably make the Tories wish they didn’t have to call an election for at least five years – and the public wish they didn’t have to endure the campaign that’s heading their way very soon. Inevitably, it was about racism, and inevitably Rishi Sunak had a miserable time. Starmer replied that he had changed his party but Sunak was scared of his Sunak did not try to pre-empt the session by announcing that Tory donor Frank Hester’s money would be going to charity, or any other measure suggesting he was taking the matter more seriously than yesterday’s slow crawl towards admitting Hester’s remarks about Diane Abbott were racist.

It's been another deeply uncomfortable day for the Tories, where the line to take on an issue of racism has collapsed at the last minute. Unsurprisingly, that collapse has also once again involved Kemi Badenoch. Ministers and Downing Street have spent the day refusing to say the word ‘racist’ when discussing the comments made by party donor Frank Hester about Diane Abbott. To recap, he was reported by the Guardian to have said in 2019 that ‘you see Diane Abbott on the TV, and you’re just like … you just want to hate all Black women because she’s there. And I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot.

Is the government’s expansion of free childcare actually going to work? The early years sector says not. They have warned that parents of two year olds won’t get the 15 funded hours they have been promised without eye-watering fee hikes overall – and that some nurseries may even be forced to close because they simply can’t balance the books. No wonder, then, that this policy was once again the focus of Labour’s attack at Education Questions in the Commons this afternoon. Ministers really do think the complaints about the scheme now simply amount to teething problems A number of opposition MPs, including Stella Creasy and shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson, raised the looming launch of these extra free hours, supposed to start in April, during the session.

Is there really any point to the NHS app monitoring people’s step count? This is the latest announcement from Health Secretary Victoria Atkins, who wants to use the app as the ‘front door to prevention’ and helping people back into work. It is easily caricatured as a modern-day Norman Tebbit ‘on yer bike’ measure, suggesting to the long-term sick that if only they walk 10,000 steps a day, they’ll get back into a job. Except perhaps they will. We have a number of problems with our current approach to illness. One of them is that we tend to view everything through a biomedical model when other interventions can be as, if not more, powerful and permanent.

Keir Starmer’s response to the Budget was delayed a little because the SNP forced a division on the immediate measures announced by the Chancellor. This was unusual, but if it gave the Labour leader a little more time to work out what he was going to say, it wasn’t clear he’d used it. He offered a stump speech that we’ve heard before: this was the ‘last, desperate act of a party that has failed’ and that there should be an election on 2 May. As I said earlier, if that was the last big event before Rishi Sunak calls a May election, he’s clearly aiming for a very low-key campaign that rests on the achievements of the past 14 years, rather than any last-minute flourishes.

Liz Kendall gave a speech this morning in which she promised to ‘build a better future’ for young people, with better mental health support and careers advice in schools. Sounds pretty motherhood-and-apple-pie from the shadow work and pensions secretary, but what’s getting more attention is that she also said there would be ‘no option of a life on benefits’ for people who can work.  This is interesting for two reasons. One is that the Labour party has really struggled over the past decade with conditionality in the benefits system, and more widely with the idea that it should tell people they should be in work. But that is exactly what Kendall said today. She told a Demos event: This is our commitment to young people. We value you. You are important.

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions was less about Rishi Sunak and more about the Tories around him. Keir Starmer opened his attack by describing the Conservatives as ‘the political wing of the flat earth society’. He said that ‘Tory MPs spent last week claiming that Britain is run by a shadowy cabal made up of activists, the deep state and most chillingly of all, the Financial Times’. Starmer’s second question referenced Liz Truss directly, but the first question was clearly designed to take in Lee Anderson’s comments about Sadiq Khan handing control of London to Islamists.

‘I’ve been sacked for doing my job. I think I’ve been sacked for doing what the law asks of me and I’ve breached, I’ve fallen down over a clause in my employment contract, which I think is a crying shame.’ That was just one of the bombs that former independent chief inspector of borders and immigration David Neal dropped at his select committee hearing this afternoon. It was never going to be a comfortable hearing, given he was sacked for being awkward to ministers in the reports he was writing on the state of border security (although they would say he was sacked for being awkward by leaking the contents of those reports). Neal’s argument was that he needed to be awkward to do his job.

Will Lindsay Hoyle really last as Speaker? Today he managed to enrage the SNP once again by refusing the party’s application for an emergency debate. The plan had been to use this SO24 debate, as it is known, to refresh the argument that the SNP couldn’t put to a vote last week about a ceasefire in Gaza. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn raised this in a point of order this afternoon. He said: Mr Speaker, you apologised to the SNP and indeed you apologised to this House. You said: “I made a mistake, we do make mistakes and I own up to mine. We can have an SO24 to get an immediate debate because the debate is so important to the House.” Those were your words, Mr Speaker... It is my understanding, Mr Speaker, that SO24 application has not been accepted.