Isabel Hardman

Today's Deputy Prime Minister's Questions was a particularly low-rent affair. Andrew Griffith was the Tory sent out to question David Lammy while Keir Starmer is in China. The shadow business secretary didn't do a particularly good job: perhaps he had assumed that Lammy would have another disastrous session like he did when a prisoner was accidentally released last autumn. The Deputy Prime Minister was unflappable today though, and clearly enjoyed himself, while Griffith sounded like he was at a departmental questions session, not the set-piece political event of the week. Lammy ended up joking that 'he's not going to get this gig again', and he was probably right.

Keir Starmer has blocked Andy Burnham from running for parliament, with the party’s National Executive Committee voting 8-1 against his candidacy for Gorton and Denton. The Prime Minister himself voted against Burnham, while his deputy Lucy Powell was the only member of the committee to vote in favour.  There is an obvious argument for blocking someone who is such an explicit threat to Starmer’s leadership. Given the Prime Minister’s weakness, it is not a given that he could see Burnham off, and so he would essentially be saying he was ready for the leadership contest that many Labour MPs think will definitely happen in May. Burnham being blocked doesn’t change the likelihood of that contest, though: it just affects the list of who the contenders will probably be.

Before Keir Starmer managed to escape Westminster for the relative safety of a European summit discussing war, the Prime Minister had to hold a cabinet meeting. The PM told colleagues they needed to hold their nerve, arguing that: ‘I do not underestimate the scale of the task. But I have no doubt about this team. Governments do not lose because polls go down. They lose when they lose belief or nerve. We will do neither.’ The readout from Downing Street also said that ministers discussed ‘successful recoveries of centre-left parties in Norway, Australia and Canada through focusing on delivery and cost of living issues’.

Do you have an issue you care about? You should probably be calling for a public inquiry into it, then. Public inquiries have become so popular in British politics that there are currently 25 running at the moment, and barely a week goes by without an MP calling for a new one at Prime Minister’s Questions. Last week MPs on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee announced an inquiry into inquiries, which follows another inquiry into inquiries by the House of Lords Statutory Inquiries Committee last year. That inquiry was in part looking at whether the previous inquiry, held ten years before, had managed to have any lasting impact (it hadn’t, and neither had many of the public inquiries themselves in the interim).

There was a revealing moment in today’s Liaison Committee session with Keir Starmer where the Prime Minister was asked about violence against women and girls. The government’s VAWG strategy is ‘due’ this week - in fact, it has been ‘due’ since the summer - and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood did the Sunday morning broadcast round heralding it yesterday. But when Home Affairs Committee chair Karen Bradley asked Starmer about the strategy itself, he still couldn’t say when it would actually be published. All he would say was that it would come out ‘as soon as possible’, adding: ‘I was in Downing Street when we brought together all the various bodies that are helping, working with us on that, the week before last, and so now we are looking at very shortly in the future.

Kemi Badenoch’s good form at Prime Minister’s Questions continues. The Tory leader visibly enjoyed herself again today as she feasted on Labour’s misfortune, and she did a good job in covering the breadth of problems in the government. She used her six questions to ask about different departments and how they were faring: an approach that can often risk diluting the overall attack. But today, Badenoch had an overarching theme to those questions, which was that the Prime Minister and his colleagues are failing to meet their own promises. The way she illustrated that argument was very effective. Badenoch opened by quoting Labour MPs criticising Starmer, something that is becoming easier to do by the week.

Is anyone happy with the latest maternity safety report, published by Baroness Amos today? The former UN diplomat says the standard of care that she has found so far in the NHS has been ‘much worse’ than she’d anticipated. This is quite striking, given the appalling findings of the many reviews that have already taken place into failings in maternity units across England. You might expect this review to merely have confirmed what has already been uncovered. From grooming gangs to maternity safety to unsafe housing, the intrays of Whitehall are groaning under 'recommendations' But many campaigners have responded to Amos’s interim report with a weariness and frustration.