Isabel Hardman

MPs and peers are going to spend the next few weeks in an almighty fight about strikes and protests. Today the Commons debates the second reading of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill. Business Secretary Grant Shapps and Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner are going head-to-head on legislation requiring unions in key sectors to provide minimum service levels even during strike action – or face being sued. In the Lords, peers will soon be debating the final stage of the Public Order Bill, which today gains a big new amendment that gives the police more powers to stop protests from becoming disruptive.  The amendment could give a lot of powers to the police that end up clamping down on peaceful and legitimate protest The protests amendment is a big deal.

Rishi Sunak has a rebel problem: we already know that. He's got factions of Tory MPs prepared to vote against the government on a range of issues, and the Prime Minister knows that on each issue, there are different rebels, rather than just one easy-to-identify awkward squad. Even when he is, as Katy explains in the magazine this week, focusing on issues that unite the party rather than reforms that will provoke some rebels such as planning reform, he still has trouble on his hands.  The current trouble comes in the form of the Online Safety Bill, which has a phalanx of Conservatives prepared to vote against their party whip in order to toughen up the legislation.

The Princess of Wales is in hot water for some remarks she made while visiting the Open Door charity in Birkenhead, which helps teenagers with their mental health problems through arts and dance. She is reported to have said: ‘Talking therapies don’t work for some people, they’re not for everybody. It’s so important to have a range of therapies.’ Her remarks have naturally been interpreted as being a veiled swipe at her estranged brother-in-law and his use of psychotherapists. I’m not sure whether it is more po-faced to do that or take her at face value, but she does have an interesting point if she’s not thinking about her privacy-loving family author.

Matilda played with her mother's stethoscopes when she was a child. As a teenager, she pored over anatomy books. She devoted her early twenties to medical school and has been cramming for postgraduate exams well into her thirties. Last summer, she jacked it all in. Being a doctor 'was turning me into a bad person,' she explained to her nonplussed friends.Many medics will recognise Matilda's fear that her job was making her less caring, both to her patients and her family. The meltdown in the NHS is leaving doctors feeling even more burnt out than during the pandemic. The effect this is having on patients is frightening.

Rishi Sunak is still refusing to say that the NHS is ‘in crisis’. He’s held meetings on ‘NHS recovery’ this weekend, and will have been told in no uncertain terms by healthcare leaders that this is a crisis, probably the worst one the health service has faced in its history. He told Laura Kuenssberg in an interview broadcast this morning that ‘the NHS is under pressure’, and there were ‘unacceptable delays’ in emergency care, but would not accept the ‘crisis’ word. This is because, as I’ve said before,  it is hard for the Tories to blame anyone else for said crisis at this stage of the political cycle.  The line that is making the headlines is Sunak’s refusal to answer questions on whether he has a private GP for his family.

When I was a student, my housemates and I would buy our groceries from a shop that offered only days of the week as the best before. We had a lettuce that went off on ‘Tuesday’, bread that would go stale on a ‘Thursday’, and so on. It was useful for the shop, and useful for a bunch of cash-strapped students as we could effectively decide which Tuesday the food would spoil by, rather than throwing it out.  I thought of that lettuce this week when Downing Street decided to make one of Rishi Sunak’s five ‘immediate priorities’ – to have NHS waiting lists falling – impossible to meet. The release accompanying the Prime Minister's speech said ‘by March, NHS waiting lists will fall’. Which March?