Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer probably found it vaguely comforting that today’s Prime Minister’s Questions at least gave the impression that he is still making decisions in Downing Street – rather than focusing entirely on when he will leave the job. The Prime Minister still has the demeanour of a duck with mobility problems but found himself answering questions about sanctions on Russia when he faced Kemi Badenoch. The Tory leader used her six questions to accuse Starmer of favouring Russian oil over granting new licences for drilling British oil in the North Sea, as well as accusing him once again of taking a ‘pompous’ and ‘patronising’ tone with her.

Like the rest of the King’s Speech, Keir Starmer’s address on the government’s legislative agenda had been prepared long before the turmoil in his party, and therefore bore little resemblance to reality. The Prime Minister did make a few joking references in his opening lines about the list of people endorsing Naz Shah’s book – adding that it was finally a list that everyone could get behind. But he largely spoke as though he were not hours away from a potential leadership challenge – or as though there were sections even of this speech that his own party wasn’t fully on board with.

All three of the resignation letters from ministers who have quit government in the past couple of hours will be painful for Keir Starmer, but Jess Phillips’s will hurt the most. The Safeguarding Minister makes a series of accusations against the Prime Minister which he will find personally hard to take. They cut right to the heart of why his premiership has failed. She describes him as a ‘good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things’, with the inevitable criticism following straight after: ‘however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough’.

Keir Starmer’s big survival speech could never be big enough to save him as Prime Minister. Whether he ends up getting the push now or later in the year has very little to do with what Starmer said today – he has been cooked for a while. But if this really had been the make-or-break speech that it has been billed as, it wouldn’t have worked, either. It largely served to highlight Starmer’s weaknesses further. Starmer really didn’t have much analysis bearing out his claim he had ‘learned a lot in the first two years in the job’ of Prime Minister It wasn’t just that he filled the speech with meaningless phrases such as ‘delivery is of course essential, but it’s not sufficient on its own to address the frustration voters feel’.

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.