Isabel Hardman

Are the Tories going to spend all week in Manchester talking but not talking about HS2? Speculation that Rishi Sunak might chop a leg off the line has now been swirling for more than a week, but the Prime Minister and his ministers are refusing to offer any further details. Yesterday, Transport Secretary Mark Harper said he wanted to be asked about something else at a fringe, while Sunak himself said he wouldn’t comment on ‘speculation’. This never makes the questions go away, and they know it.

Rishi Sunak hadn’t wanted to announce the first part of his ‘vision’ for government this way. He was bounced into the press conference on a new approach to net zero by a massive leak. Towards the end of the Q&A session, the Prime Minister said, slightly testily, that he hoped ‘now people, rather than looking at the speculation, but having now seen what I’ve actually said and the detail of what I was saying can digest it, absorb it, and I think it will command very broad support, not just in our party but also in the country’. Sunak struggled with accusations that he ‘watered down’ the UK’s commitments on tackling climate change.

Rishi Sunak didn’t use the same language as Gillian Keegan today when he returned to Prime Minister’s Questions. But he clearly also thinks people should be thanking the government for the good job it is doing. The session was dominated by the concrete crisis in schools, but Sunak also wanted MPs to give him some credit for the economy recovering and inflation falling. He complained that both Keir Starmer and SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn had failed to mention these in their questions, and even rather boldly proclaimed that small boat crossings were down – despite them passing the 100,000 mark this summer and despite the Bibby Stockholm fiasco.

Michael Gove today announced that the government was relaxing the effective ban on new onshore wind farms that was introduced by David Cameron. Under those rules, just one objection could stop a planned wind farm – but they’ve been scrapped with immediate effect.  The reason? Rishi Sunak was facing a rebellion from Tory MPs, of course. The Prime Minister held talks with the would-be rebels, led by former Cop26 president Alok Sharma, and concluded that he would have to yield to their demands. They were trying to force the government to get on with a promise that was supposed to have been fulfilled by April – and were going to use an amendment to the Energy Bill, currently being debated in the Commons, to do it.

Gillian Keegan’s Commons statement on the school concrete crisis will not be the most memorable contribution the Education Secretary made today: that award goes to her hot mic moment a few hours before where she appeared to suggest that people should be grateful for what she was doing and that others hadn’t been doing anything at all. Both could of course be true, and though she didn’t repeat what she had described in her apology as her ‘choice’ language, she did make points to MPs that backed up her ‘fucking good job’ argument. It was a very uncomfortable session, naturally, because Labour went on the attack about this being the latest sign of a crumbling country neglected by the Conservatives.

Brace yourselves for health week. After the rip-roaring success of the government's 'stop the boats' week, you might forgive the NHS for looking a bit scared that now ministers have the health service on their media grid for the coming days. As with last week's focus on illegal immigration, the government is kicking off with a series of pre-briefed stories in the Sunday newspapers about the health service – and it's striking how many of them are designed to take the fight to Labour. There's the claim in the Sun by Welsh Secretary David Davies that Sue Gray, who is about to become Keir Starmer's chief of staff, 'dragged her heels' on data showing how the NHS was performing in Labour-run Wales.