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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Trust between the BMA and politicians has never been particularly strong. In the middle of the longest strike in NHS history, we are now seeing a breakdown in trust between the doctors’ union and leaders in the health service. Last night the union issued what was, even by its own standards, a bit of a
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As junior doctors begin the longest strike in history, Lucy Dunn speaks to Isabel Hardman and Kate Andrews about whether public support for industrial action is starting to wane, and how talks might be different under Labour.
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Rishi Sunak appeared in front of the Liaison Committee this afternoon. In an interview with The Spectator last week, the PM said that he was enjoying the job. So why did he seem so agitated at the grilling today? Max Jeffery speaks to Isabel Hardman and James Heale.
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If Rishi Sunak still doesn’t recognise the description of himself as ‘tetchy’, then he could do worse than to watch back his performance before the liaison committee this afternoon. The Prime Minister was not in a good mood when the questions started, though he did seem to relax a little as the 90-minute session wore
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The last Prime Minister’s Questions of the year always has a festive, pantomime tone to it. That doesn’t mean it is always a cheery, comfortable experience for a prime minister, though, and it wasn’t today. At least Rishi Sunak could come to the chamber with the knowledge that his Rwanda legislation had passed its first
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There is a lot more trouble to come on the Rwanda Bill, whatever happens tonight. When James Cleverly told MPs earlier that the emergency legislation complied with international law but was ‘very much pushing at the edge of the envelope’, he was trying to suggest that there was something for everyone. So far all the
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Robert Jenrick has just given a furious speech against the Rwanda Bill in the Commons. It was a very well delivered speech, and highly persuasive. The former immigration minister not only took apart the flaws of the legislation as he saw them: he also explained why he had apparently adopted a much harder line while
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Rishi Sunak had a strange pandemic. He spent a lot of it in government meetings, the details of which he could not recall, and with people who he always got on with. That was the overall thrust of his evidence to the Covid Inquiry today. The only phrase that came up more than a variation
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Rishi Sunak has already provided a statement of evidence to the Covid Inquiry, but this morning’s hearing spent more time examining his interview with Fraser in The Spectator last summer. Hugo Keith KC was particularly interested in whether Sunak had a line of communication with Boris Johnson that wasn’t recorded. Keith was referring to a
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What does Boris Johnson want to come out of the Covid Inquiry? At the end of his second day of evidence today, the former prime minister claimed that it was social care reform and an investigation into how Covid originated. He told the room that in case he didn’t give evidence again (which he may
