Isabel Hardman

The debate about NHS strikes is turning into one of those 'am I being unreasonable?' threads on Reddit and Mumsnet, where posters jump all over each other to point out the way someone has messed up in a relationship. Health Secretary Steve Barclay is still hoping to win the war of attrition between the government and healthcare workers by appealing to the unions to be reasonable and constructive. Barclay made that argument again today when taking departmental questions in the Commons, but his announcement last night that he would be taking the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to court in a bid to stop that union's strikes showed that it is becoming harder, not easier, to stick to this line of attack.

Rishi Sunak seems keen to stand back from the row about Dominic Raab, offering more of a commentary on it being ‘right’ that the deputy prime minister and Justice Secretary has quit government, rather than accepting that Raab was a bully. His reply to Raab’s resignation letter suggests this, and this afternoon his official spokesman said the Prime Minister thought it was ‘right’ to make the commitment to resign if there was a finding of bullying and that the former Secretary of State had ‘kept his word’. ‘He thanks him for his work and it has allowed him to form a judgement and he will now be focused on the work of government,’ the spokesman said.

Does Humza Yousaf really want to be 'focusing relentlessly on the day job', as he claimed at First Minister's Questions today? It's not a fun day job to focus on. The First Minister naturally had to face questions on the crisis in his own party when he faced MSPs today, with both Douglas Ross and Anas Sarwar majoring on it. The Scottish Tory leader tried to suggest the investigation into the SNP's finances was distracting Yousaf from his day job, and moved onto one of the 'matters of substance' he felt needed more attention, which was sentencing policy. Yousaf, of course, previously served as justice secretary, and had to answer questions on prison sentences for under-25s after the shocking case of a convicted rapist who avoided jail because of his age.

Keir Starmer had a much better Prime Minister's Questions than Rishi Sunak today. The main reason for this was that the Labour leader had come with a clear thesis about the Tories breaking public services and Sunak not noticing. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister had brought along a bizarre insult for his opponent. While Starmer ridiculed the claim by Conservative party chair Greg Hands that public services are in 'good shape', Sunak derided the opposition leader as 'Sir Softy'. At one point he claimed 'that's why they call him Sir Softy' – even though 'they' could only possibly refer to the aides he had been preparing for the session with, and even though Sir Softy sounds more like the name for an ice cream van than someone voters might reject at the ballot box.

It was, by his own admission, a 'not ideal' set of circumstances for Humza Yousaf's speech setting out his priorities as First Minister, with the arrest of the party treasurer just hours before he was due in the Scottish parliament chamber amid the ongoing investigation into the party's finances. Then again, there were a lot of 'not ideal' policies that Yousaf had to deal with. Despite previously boasting that he would have Sturgeon on 'speed dial', Yousaf spent today's speech distancing himself from her policies.

How long are the NHS strikes going to go on for? The collapse in agreement on nurses’ pay over the Easter recess has made it much harder for ministers to push the British Medical Association towards a deal on junior doctors’ pay, as well as undermining Rishi Sunak's positioning as someone who gets things done. The Royal College of Nursing is now balloting its members on further strike action after they narrowly rejected the pay offer made by the government. Today, Health Secretary Steve Barclay was summoned to the Commons to answer an urgent question from Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting on how the government planned to stop further strikes.

Humza Yousaf is now officially the First Minister of Scotland, after Holyrood voted in favour of him taking over from Nicola Sturgeon. Yousaf secured the votes of all his 71 SNP colleagues and Scottish Greens.  The process in Holyrood allows other candidates to nominate themselves for the role too, so the party leaders of the Scottish Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats each put themselves forward and gave short speeches in favour of their candidacy. In practice, this was largely an opportunity for those three MSPs to set out their attack key lines on a new First Minister. All of them declared the SNP as being past it. Liberal Democrat Alex Cole-Hamilton said there was ‘more water behind this government’ than lay ahead of it.

Unionist politicians are warming up for what they hope will be one of the biggest opportunities of the past two decades to undermine the independence cause. Whoever wins the SNP leadership contest today is taking over a party that doesn't know its own kind any more - and a government that's struggling to blame its record entirely on Westminster.  That's one of the reasons Anas Sarwar has called for a snap Holyrood election. The Scottish Labour leader today argued that the new First Minister would have to seek their own mandate, saying: This is an SNP that screams about mandates: let's be honest, the next SNP First Minister will not have the mandate.

It's tempting to see Keir Starmer as a political wind-up merchant given the number of times he likes to quote people who annoy his own activists. Recently he adopted the ‘take back control’ slogan and today he approvingly quoted Margaret Thatcher. Hell, the man has even praised Tony Blair.  Labour sees an opportunity in the rising salience of crime among voters The Thatcher quote today was in a speech about crime. The Labour leader told his audience in Stoke that: ‘The rule of law is the foundation for everything. Margaret Thatcher called it the “first duty of government” – and she was right.’ He later accused the Tories of having ‘thrown in the towel’ as he promised, like Blair in the 1990s, to make Labour tough on crime.

What was Boris Johnson up to at the Privileges Committee? The former prime minister has just finished more than three hours of evidence on whether he deliberately misled the Commons over partygate. In his opening statement, he said ‘hand on heart, I did not lie to the House’. One of his repeated insistences was that he was just doing the ‘right thing’ when he was thanking staff who were leaving, despite MPs on the committee also repeatedly insisting that the guidance at the time clearly did not allow this. He also appeared to lose his cool at times. ‘People who say that we are partying in lockdown simply do not know what they are talking about!’ he snapped at one point. This appearance of emotion was probably calculated rather than genuine.

The money for the NHS pay agreement isn’t new cash, I’m told. This is going to cause a real ruckus with the trade unions, who came away from today’s talks believing that the £2.5 billion deal was extra money from the Treasury. But talking to my sources in government, I now understand that while there won’t be cuts to frontline services, the money could come from efficiencies elsewhere in the NHS, or possible underspend in Department of Health and Social Care budgets.   I'’ve also been pointed to the fact that there was no new money for pay announced in yesterday’s Budget, even though there might be some forthcoming in future fiscal events.