Isabel Hardman

Rishi Sunak is resurfacing today after the Christmas break and amidst the NHS meltdown to talk about maths. The Prime Minister's new year speech contains an announcement that has provoked a visceral personal reaction in many of the mildly innumerate inhabitants of the Westminster village. It's the sort of response that will underline to the PM and his team why Britain needs to take maths more seriously than it does. His solution to this country viewing maths as something to bunk off as soon as possible is to make it compulsory to 18, though he is not expected to make all students sit Maths A level.  The overriding reaction in Westminster is 'why maths?

Anyone who thinks the NHS isn't in a state of collapse hasn't been paying attention. This is the 75th year of the health service, and it is arguably its worst. Emergency doctors are now warning that A&E delays are ‘killing up to 500 people a week’. They say as many as 500 people could be dying each week because of delays in emergency care, with horrific individual stories about 99-hour waits and patients lying on the floors of A&Es. What is harder even for those who are paying attention to spot is what the government is doing to respond to this crisis.  Rishi Sunak has been worried about the NHS ever since he took over as Prime Minister, and long before.

Rishi Sunak will have suspected that Keir Starmer was going to bring up housebuilding at Prime Minister’s Questions today, and so he came prepared. The Labour leader has been using the Tory revolts on the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill to build his case that the Prime Minister is weak, and today he did indeed open on the latest U-turns on housing. He said Sunak had broken the manifesto promise to build 300,000 homes without consulting voters about it, asking: ‘What changed?’Sunak was indeed well prepared.

Another day, another U-turn: this time on onshore wind. To the surprise of no-one, the government has given in to rebel Tory backbenchers, including two former prime ministers, who had been pushing for the end to the moratorium on new onshore wind farms. The amendment to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill from former Levelling Up secretary Simon Clarke would instead allow new windmills in areas where there was genuine local support. Tonight, the Levelling Up ministry announced a ‘technical consultation’ which will ‘explore how local authorities demonstrate local support and respond to views of their communities when considering onshore wind development in England’.

A Labour leader opening Prime Minister’s Questions with a description of the luxurious private schooling that the Conservative Prime Minister enjoyed doesn’t sound particularly informative – or indeed relevant – to many voters. Keir Starmer’s opening question this afternoon was this: ‘Winchester College has a rowing club, a rifle club and an extensive art collection. They charge more than £45,000 a year in fees. Why did [Sunak] hand them nearly £6 million of taxpayers’ money this year in what his Levelling Up Secretary calls “egregious state support”?

Are the Conservatives planning to inject Andy Burnham with political steroids? That could be the result of one of the plans being mulled by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who has been trying to work out how to make levelling up something that works and lasts. Greater Manchester Tories will spit tacks about the mayoral position created by their own party As I reported in the Observer yesterday, Hunt wants to change the current model of areas bidding endlessly for small pots of money here and there to one where the power is decentralised from Whitehall to local elected representatives. The ideal people to do this, of course, would be elected mayors, given that the whole point of setting up these new layers of government was to empower local areas to take their own decisions.

How many more Tories will announce they’re stepping down at the next election? They need to tell the party in the next two weeks whether they want to do it or not, though there is no obligation for them to share their decision more widely. I understand that Rishi Sunak and his team have been working extremely hard to convince a lot of wavering MPs who wonder what the point is. Most of them expect their party to go into the misery of opposition at the next election, and don’t want to be stuck in those doldrums. Many are worried that they will be among those who lose their seats in that defeat, and can’t face the exhaustion of the campaign followed by the indignity of losing their job in public.

Today’s net migration figures naturally present a problem for ministers in that they are going in the opposite direction to what the government officially says they should be. As Fraser says here, net migration to the UK last year was at a record high of 504,000, and this looks rather different to the high-wage, high-skill and low migration model spoken of in the Brexit debate. The government approach currently is to focus on the specific bit that winds voters up – illegal crossings using small boats in the Channel – rather than the general numbers.