Isabel Hardman

The final Prime Minister's Questions of a parliamentary session is often quite a demob-happy affair with a pantomime atmosphere. Today's, though, was more important for Keir Starmer, who is now in a daily battle to show that he's still got enough support to keep going a bit longer. He didn't have a bad session, but as with many of the events in the Commons this week, it won't make much difference to his longevity.  Badenoch's opener drew a contrast between the start of the parliamentary session, when 'sycophantic' Labour MPs had asked Starmer supportive questions, and this week, when the 'Prime Minister was reduced to begging those same MPs to save his own skin'.

For something that’s apparently only a ‘desperate political stunt’, Keir Starmer is taking the looming vote on whether to refer him to the privileges committee pretty seriously. There is a gargantuan effort tonight underway behind the scenes to persuade Labour MPs not to vote for the referral that the Tories want to make, with Labour grandees including Gordon Brown making public statements of support for the Prime Minister. This effort may pay off to the extent that the Tories only get to say to voters on the doorstep that their Labour MP blocked an investigation into the Prime Minister. But as with all prime ministers who reach this level of ‘embattled’, it only delays the inevitable.

Sir Olly Robbins dropped a series of political bombs throughout his evidence session on Peter Mandelson to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Like all civil servants, he did so in exactly the same calm, polite tone of voice as he would have used when talking about something boring, but the content of that evidence was anything but. It was seriously damaging for Keir Starmer – and it wasn’t just about Mandelson. The former permanent under-secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) told MPs within minutes of starting his session that, when he began the job, ‘I walked into a situation in which there was already a very, very strong expectation’ that Mandelson needed to be in America ‘as soon as possible’.

What a funny pair Lee Anderson and Zarah Sultana are: so vehemently opposed to one another’s politics and yet so similar in the way they operate, right down to getting sent out of the Commons this afternoon for calling the Prime Minister a liar. Anderson was first up with his question: ‘The problem the Prime Minister has got is no one believes him. The public don’t believe him, the MPs on this side of the House don’t believe him. His own gullible backbenchers don’t believe him. Does the Prime Minister agree with me he’s been lying?’  By asking a question containing unparliamentary language, they ensured that Starmer didn’t have to answer it at all The Speaker demanded that he withdrew the word ‘lying’, as it is considered unparliamentary language.

George Robertson’s critique of the government’s reluctance to commit to proper defence spending is deeply politically inconvenient for Keir Starmer. This is not just because the Prime Minister has tried repeatedly to claim that Labour is the party that is protecting the armed forces – while holding onto Ben Wallace’s ‘hollowed out’ line about the Tories as a comfort blanket. But the speech that the co-author of the strategic defence review will give tonight also highlights the government’s failure to reform welfare, with one of the pre-trailed lines being ‘we cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget’.

Why is Wes Streeting launching a report that argues the NHS doesn’t need to change its funding model? The Health Secretary gave a speech this morning at the IPPR to mark a new analysis of whether social insurance systems automatically lead to better health outcomes. The answer, according to the report’s authors at least, is that they don’t and that overhauling the funding source of the NHS would not solve its most serious problems.  Its analysis ‘confirms the finding of other studies: no group of health systems systematically outperforms another’, but it is not exactly complimentary of the NHS itself.

Mental health provision is totally inadequate in this country: we already know that. But you can only really understand quite how badly broken it is by looking at how much other public services are creaking as a result. Take the report today from patient safety watchdog the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB), which warns that mental health patients stuck in emergency departments in England are at risk of significant harm because they can currently leave of their own accord, even when staff deem them too sick to be on their own.

One of the key rites of passage for all modern prime ministers is losing their temper a little during an exchange with Bernard Jenkin at the liaison committee. It happened to David Cameron, who would go rather pink and say ‘the thing is, BERNARD’ while trying to explain why he hadn’t implemented Jenkin’s committee’s plan on civil service reform. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak had similar run-ins with the veteran Tory MP. Today, though, Keir Starmer lost his cool even more than the others had previously – and it was on a very telling topic. Jenkin wanted to know why Britain was ‘not on a war footing’ and where the much-delayed defence investment plan was. Starmer told him that ‘we are finalising the investment plan’, and was accused of ‘enormous complacency’.

The Covid inquiry has published the third of its ten (ten!) modules today, this time focused on how the healthcare systems of the UK coped with the pandemic. Its key finding is that they only just managed to do so, and ‘on a number of occasions, they teetered on the brink of collapse’. That they did survive was ‘thanks to the almost superhuman efforts of healthcare workers and all the staff who support them’.  The inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, also takes issue with ‘politicians, including the secretary of state for health and social care, Matt Hancock’, who were ‘reluctant to accept that healthcare systems were “overwhelmed” as they chose this to mean total collapse’. She argues that ‘ultimately, in my view, it is a question of semantics.