Isabel Hardman

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. The Labour leader opened with a reasonably jocular question about ‘one ambitious Tory MP’ who had reservations about the scheme when Boris Johnson first proposed it. ‘He agreed with Labour that it wouldn’t work, that it was a waste of money, it was the latest in a long line of gimmicks. Does the Prime Minister know what happened to that MP?

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 demanding that she be stripped of the honour had reached 1.2 million signatures, and Rishi Sunak had let it be known that he was very supportive of the Honours Committee looking into whether she should lose the gong. So it was only a matter of time – and Vennells has clearly decided to cut the drama short on this at least.  Vennells and Ed Davey are the current lightning rods for a political debate that should have raged a good while ago.

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 number of MPs for the compensation process for the victims to be sped up, and for those responsible in the Post Office and Fujitsu to be identified and held to account. The Sunday papers carry reports that Justice Secretary Alex Chalk is examining ways of exonerate those who were wrongly convicted of stealing from the Post Office.

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 didn’t then go for a spring poll. He knows from watching what happened to Gordon Brown’s Election That Never Was the dangers of ramping up speculation without following through. That doesn’t mean he won’t change course and go for the May election in the end anyway, but dampening the chatter about it is a sensible tactic.

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 hurdle in the Commons, rather than on the back of an angry and sizeable revolt by Tory MPs. The PM received loud cheers from Conservative MPs as he stood up. He even cracked a joke about there being a ‘record number of families’ under the Conservatives – reference to the hilarious new mafia-style branding for the five groups of Tory MPs now co-ordinating their response to the Rwanda legislation.

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 speeches in the debate on the second reading have suggested that there will be a lot of abstentions, with no Tory MP yet saying they will vote against. The five groups of traditional Tories have just said they ‘cannot support the bill tonight’ – which again is not an instruction to vote it down, and Mark Francois, who delivered the announcement, said they would be seeking changes later in the legislative process.

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 on ‘I do not recall the specific details’ was ‘referring to the Spectator article’ (you can re-read this now vital piece of inquiry evidence here).  There was one thing the Prime Minister can recollect in sharp detail from his time as chancellor, though, and that’s that absolutely no one raised any concerns with him about the Eat Out to Help Out scheme between it being proposed and going live. ‘There was almost a month between announcement and commencement’, he told the inquiry.

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 well have to do as the inquiry is split into modules), he wanted to make an important point: I do think that when you come to the issues of health and social care are absolutely critical, and the government that I led was embarked on a big programme to try to bring them together. I think the fact that we had those delayed discharge patients was very, very difficult in the NHS. I hope that this Inquiry will give a kick to the powers that be to make sure that we really address that.

In the past few minutes, James Cleverly has confirmed that Robert Jenrick has resigned as immigration minister. He was asked repeatedly about the position of his minister of state in the Home Office during his statement on the emergency Rwanda legislation, and he has now said it ‘has been confirmed’ that Jenrick has left his role, which suggests the Secretary of State didn't know the position when he entered the chamber. Cleverly added: ‘Of course I speak with the ministers in the department regularly but ultimately the question of this session should be about the Bill but about the individuals in the House.’ This was swiftly followed by Mark Francois, who told the Chamber that it was ‘deeply worrying’ that Jenrick had gone.

James Cleverly has just signed a new treaty with Rwanda that the UK government hopes will lead to the deportation policy finally getting going. As he did so, the Home Secretary insisted that the Rwandan government had made a ‘strong commitment’ to the safety of asylum seekers – which was the key reason the Supreme Court had ruled against the policy. He told a press conference in Kigali that ‘we’ve addressed the issues that were raised by their Lordships’ and said Rwanda had established a reputation for the humane treatment of refugees. The treaty that was signed today ‘builds on that joint work’.  The Home Secretary was clearly very careful to suggest that the Rwandan government was already doing the work needed, rather than the UK having to swoop in to improve things.

The government has just been defeated in the Commons for the first time since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister. It wasn’t on one of the issues Sunak and his camp fret most about: it was on compensation for victims of the contaminated blood scandal. It was close: the government lost by just four votes on an amendment to the Victims and Prisoners Bill by Labour's Diana Johnson. The new clause passed 246 votes to 242, with 23 Conservatives backing the motion.  Johnson was calling for the government to establish a new body chaired by a High Court judge to administer compensation for victims, and that this would be done within three months of the Bill being enacted.