Isabel Hardman

How and where did Nicola Sturgeon make her big decisions during the pandemic? Not on WhatsApp, and never badly, according to the evidence she has given to the UK Covid Inquiry so far this morning. The questions to the former first minister have largely focused on how she recorded discussions between ministers, and why she deleted WhatsApp messages. She admitted that she did delete them, but insisted that it was not her practice to have detailed discussions with colleagues about decision-making on this channel anyway. ‘It’s not my style’, she said, criticising the use of WhatsApp in government as being too common and that it was too open to misinterpretation.

What sort of trouble is the Rwanda deportation legislation going to get into in the Lords? It passed its second reading last night, as expected, and peers also defeated an attempt by the Liberal Democrats to block the legislation entirely. But the debate gave us some idea of the problems the Safety of Rwanda Bill will encounter when the noble Lords really get down to business.  There were truly stinging speeches from some peers who are not given to melodrama. Lord Hennessy, the foremost historian of the British constitution, has been increasingly frustrated by the ways in which he feels the past few iterations of Conservative government have been undermining constitutional norms. His speech last night went much further than his previous criticisms, though.

Tory ministers are now well rehearsed in the latest slogan that Rishi Sunak wants to take into the election. Today’s Education Questions in the Commons underlined what it is: ‘Our plan is working, Labour would take us back to square one.’ Education Secretary Gillian Keegan took care to ram that into every answer she gave, as did her junior ministers. The Conservatives have a plan on childcare provision, Labour doesn’t; the Conservatives have a plan to give better mental health support in primary and secondary schools, Labour doesn’t; the Conservatives are funding breakfast clubs in primary… you get the picture. It shouldn’t normally be remarkable that ministers in the governing party are using their Commons slots to spout slogans in an election year.

The government has just lost one of its bargaining chips in the long-running junior doctors’ strikes: hospital consultants have narrowly voted against the pay deal that they were offered. The BMA had put to its members the offer of an additional 4.95 per cent, on top of the 6 per cent raise already given to them in April, and 51 per cent voted against it. The union’s strike mandate lasts until June this year, which means there could be further damaging walkouts from senior doctors. So far, the union has said ‘we have decided not to call strike action at the current time but instead enter discussions with government to see whether we can secure improvement to address our members’ concerns.

Rishi Sunak sidestepped another Tory rebellion this afternoon with the announcement of an extra £500 million in funding for councils in England. A group of more than 40 Conservative MPs had joined colleagues from other parties to warn of a crisis in local authority funding that was threatening even deeper cuts to services and council tax hikes in an election year. In a written ministerial statement, Michael Gove said this extra money, which is to cover rising costs in adult and children’s social care, was coming because ‘the government has also listened to the sector and to the issues raised by members of this house’.

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 way linked to the war in Gaza – though once again he did update MPs on the latter. He also announced that the government was giving MPs an opportunity for a ‘full debate on our broader approach in the Red Sea tomorrow’.

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 walks with him while he repeats what the government is doing on the NHS. He does not, as the initial clip circulated suggested, walk straight off, but the encounter remains awkward for the Prime Minister as he doesn’t seem to take any interest in the individual case at all. This clip was circulated first: Exclusive footage of Rishi Sunak challenged this morning by a former health worker on the state of the NHS, - captured by an off duty @skynews camera operator pic.twitter.

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 it. The final attempt from former immigration minister Robert Jenrick to toughen the Bill up failed, which was expected too, but 61 Tory MPs did still rebel on his amendment, which aimed to block so-called ‘pyjama injunctions’ from European judges.  Labour’s Stella Creasy clashed with a number of Tories, including Suella Braverman and Danny Kruger In the debate, James Cleverly took care to reassure both sides that the Bill was what they were after.

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 trooped through the opposite lobbies to vote to toughen up the Rwanda Bill. The breakdown of those rebellions is as follows: 68 MPs, including 60 Tories (two of which were tellers), voted in favour of Bill Cash’s amendment, which would allow the government to deport people to Rwanda even if it went against the European Convention on Human Rights and other international law, with 529 MPs voting it down.

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 Friday was ‘taken in self defence: it was limited, not escalatory’. He was very careful to emphasise that he was making himself accountable to parliament, but even more assiduous in knocking down any suggestion that this action was in any way linked to the war in Gaza. He said: We shouldn’t fall for their malign narrative that this is about Israel and Gaza. They target ships from around the world.

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 BBC found that NHS England last met the four hour A&E target in July 2015, the 62-day cancer treatment target in December 2015, and planned hospital care in February 2016.  The NHS also released performance figures today showing that while its waiting lists in England have fallen for the second month in a row, there are still more people waiting for treatment than when Rishi Sunak made his key pledge to have the lists falling.