Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson has not accepted responsibility for the two by-election defeats. You could have written this line at any point today and it would be true – and it remains the case after the Prime Minister gave a press conference from the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Kigali. He said the party needed to ‘listen to the messages that we are getting’ but made clear that the message he was hearing was that the government needed to focus not on Westminster matters but on delivering the things that mattered to the British people.

Jacob Rees-Mogg this week unveiled something that has variously been mocked as either a 'vanity project' or the Johnson administration's equivalent of the Major government's Cones Hotline. The Cones Hotline was a policy designed to tackle the great social evil of traffic cones loitering without intent – and became emblematic of that government's tiredness and lack of proper ideas.  The Brexit Opportunities Minister has come up with a 'retained EU law dashboard', which he told MPs yesterday was 'of both political - and in my view - historic constitutional importance'.

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer both came to Prime Minister's Questions today wanting to talk about the rail strikes. The Tory leader was keen to pin the blame on Labour, pointing out that 25 MPs from that party joined RMT picket lines yesterday. Starmer meanwhile thinks, as I explained here, that he can be bullish on this too because the public are blaming the government. The Labour leader asked whether Johnson was 'genuine about preventing strikes', calling for details of meetings he or Transport Secretary Grant Shapps had held with 'rail workers' (a way of avoiding saying 'unions') this week.

Is the government's approach to strikes and public sector pay too blunt? Today Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak took the opportunity of the Cabinet meeting to underline 'the importance of fiscal discipline'. The Chancellor told the meeting that 'the government had responsibility to not take any action that would feed into inflationary pressures or reduce the Government's ability to lower taxes in the future'. That's a roundabout way of saying to ministers (and the public, given this part of the private meeting was briefed out) that he's not budging on public sector pay increases. It is a far cry from the 'high wage, high skill economy' that the Prime Minister was promising just months ago at the Tory party conference.

Has Boris Johnson run out of ideas? It's not an unreasonable question at the end of a week in which more than 40 per cent of his MPs said they didn't want him leading them any more. Still less unreasonable when his big reveal policies have been getting on with something that David Cameron signed off on in 2015 but that hasn't yet happened; and a 'once in a generation' transformation of the NHS which seems to amount to some middle managers going on a course. The right to buy announcement will merely implement an old policy, while the mortgage review alongside it may help a few first time buyers.

There's a row afoot in the House of Lords. That's a bit of a dog-bites-man line these days, with government defeats in the Upper Chamber being so common that they're totally unremarkable. But this latest spot of bother doesn't come from Labour or the Lib Dems or even those difficult-to-read crossbenchers. No: the new rebels are a bunch of Tory ex-ministers who want to delete a large chunk of their party's own bill. At this stage, the trio are merely politely asking ministers to delete the first 18 clauses of the bill. The Schools Bill is currently in the Committee Stage - where peers go through line-by-line scrutiny of the legislation - in the Lords.

Another day, another ridiculous Boris Johnson statement. This morning, the cabinet discussed whether the NHS was to become like Netflix, and predictably everyone has got very excited. It's worth having a look at what actually happened at the meeting, though. The official readout is that Sajid Javid — not Johnson ― updated ministers on 'the scale of the challenge post-pandemic — saying we had a Blockbuster healthcare system in the age of Netflix'. He then elaborated on this: 'He said it was no longer simply an option to stick with the status quo. He said large-scale changes were needed in areas such as the use of technology and data to help frontline workers deliver the high-quality service the public expects.' What is he on about?