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.
‘Another week with no ideas. Absolutely no ideas for this country and absolutely no plans.’ Either Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer could have hurled that insult across the chamber at Prime Minister’s Questions this week – or indeed any week. Once again, both leaders were arguing over who didn’t have a plan, with a few
Simon Clarke’s detonation last night didn’t come as a huge surprise. The Tory whips had already pre-briefed a group of MPs that the Daily Telegraph piece calling for Sunak to go was incoming, and asked them to get out and fight Clarke’s comments. For all the whips’ efforts, there are other Conservative MPs who are
What happens if the latest round of strikes against the Houthis don’t deter them? That was the big question as Rishi Sunak made his statement to the Commons on yesterday’s attacks. The Prime Minister stuck to his two key lines from last week, that the strikes were targeted, and that the Houthis’ attacks are no
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The UK launched a new set of strikes on eight Houthi targets last night. Typoon jets dropped £30,000 Paveway bombs on an underground storage site and surveillance and missile capabilities controlled by the Yemeni rebel group. But are the strikes working? The Houthis have continued to attack ships in the Red Sea, and a row
Are Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak asking the right question as they approach the spring Budget? For the Chancellor and Prime Minister, the key issue is ‘how can we cut taxes in a way that will get us credit with voters?’ But polling by YouGov for today’s Times suggests voters might want them to ask
Rishi Sunak has been caught on camera apparently walking away from a woman who has just started telling him about his daughter’s ordeal waiting for NHS treatment. As she starts to complain, he is looking anxiously over his shoulder at his aide, and then says he needs to get to the next appointment. She then
As expected, the Commons has backed the Safety of Rwanda Bill at third reading by 320 votes to 276. Just 11 Tory MPs voted against, with the full list below. This afternoon, the noise from the rebels became rather more muffled, with the ‘five families’ of right-wing backbenchers announcing that the majority would be supporting
Another week, another Prime Minister’s Questions featuring the two party leaders trading exactly the same insult: you don’t believe in anything. Keir Starmer wanted to argue that Rishi Sunak didn’t believe in his own Rwanda policy, while the Prime Minister tried to claim that the Labour leader would say anything to get what he needed
It’s always a mistake for Downing Street to pretend it knows backbenchers’ minds better than they do It turns out that Tory backbenchers aren’t all mouth and no trousers, as Downing Street thought. After briefing that the right of the party was all talk, Rishi Sunak’s team watched this evening as around 60 rebels repeatedly
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With the Tories reeling from yesterday’s poll in the Telegraph, it is interesting that the party’s official election strategist Isaac Levido was already scheduled to address Tory MPs last night. Levido ran the 2019 election campaign and holds clout with Conservative MPs. What did he have to say? Is the Tory strategy evolving? Also on the
Rishi Sunak has updated MPs on the strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, just as a missile reportedly from the rebel group hit a US-owned cargo ship. The Prime Minister told the Commons that he had come to tell members at the first opportunity and that the action taken by the US and UK on
Has Keir Starmer got himself into yet another pickle about what he really thinks? The Labour leader and his frontbenchers are having to defend a leadership contest pledge he made that he now appears to have junked. They’re obviously used to this, but the latest pledge is on whether parliament should get a vote before
How has the NHS missed most of its key targets for the past seven years? Some parts of the UK-wide health services (Northern Ireland and Wales) have never met the four-hour time target for A&E, for instance, while others only managed it during lockdown (Scotland) when visits plummeted. Analysis of the NHS’s own figures by
The language in the government and parliament over Israel has changed a lot this week. Ministers are no longer mounting the full throttle defence of Israel or offering regular reminders to the Commons of what happened on 7 October. Lord Cameron’s evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday was just one example of that: the
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At PMQs today Rishi Sunak took the opportunity to announce that the government will be introducing legislation to ‘swiftly’ exonerate the victims of the Post Office scandal. Keir Starmer chose not to probe, instead grilling Rishi on his commitment to curbing migration. With the Safety of Rwanda Bill returning to the Commons next week, will
Keir Starmer clearly judged that while the Post Office scandal is the hot topic today, voters will be thinking about other things come election time. And so he used the first Prime Minister’s Questions of the year to attack Rishi Sunak on the Rwanda policy, just as the Tory row over that kicks off again.
Rishi Sunak used the start of Prime Minister’s Questions today to announce that the government will be introducing legislation to exonerate the victims of the Post Office scandal. A planted question from Tory party deputy chair Lee Anderson enabled the Prime Minister to say: The victims must get justice and compensation… today I can announce
Paula Vennells has announced she will hand back her CBE with immediate effect, meaning the former Post Office boss now suffers the pain of a slightly shorter name as a consequence of the wrongful conviction of hundreds of subpostmasters. The former Post Office boss now suffers the pain of a slightly shorter name A petition
The government is now ‘under pressure’ over the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. The pressure comes in the form of a petition calling for Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, to lose her CBE. It has garnered more than 920,000 signatures as of this evening. Then there’s the push from a
Rishi Sunak is – not unusually – playing it safe by saying his ‘working assumption’ is that the election will be in the second half of this year. The speculation that it would be on 2 May had been building to the point that the Prime Minister was at risk of looking afraid if he
