Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are both to receive fixed penalty notices for attending lockdown parties, it has just emerged. The police fines for breaking Covid laws, which these two men created, throw everything around the Prime Minister and the Chancellor into the air. Previously, many Tory MPs had said this would be a resigning matter for a serving PM to be found to have broken the law. A No. 10 spokesperson confirmed the fines, saying: ‘The Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer have today received notification that the Metropolitan police intend to issue them with fixed penalty notices.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has changed Europe forever. That was the argument that Boris Johnson made on Friday when he held a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. One of the changes Johnson was keen to emphasise was that European leaders are united in their support of Ukraine and against Putin. This, he argued, was one of the ways in which the Russian President had failed: he had sought to create divisions in Europe, but had 'demonstrably failed'. 'The Europe we knew just six weeks ago no longer exists: Putin's invasion strikes at the very foundations of the security of our continent,' he said, adding: 'Putin has steeled our resolve, sharpened our focus, and he has forced Europe to begin to rearm to guarantee our shared security.

The government has had to bow to the inevitable and cancel its own international LGBT conference after more than 100 organisations withdrew their support as a protest against the decision to not ban conversion therapy for transgender people. The die was cast much further back than last week’s botched double-U-turn on a ban on gay conversion therapy: it was when ministers committed to the legislation without thinking it through at all. This latest row highlights one of the serious problems with the way Westminster deals with legislation. Its focus is almost entirely upon the principles at stake, rather than the impact of the way the laws are drafted.

Can Sajid Javid really say, as he did this afternoon in the Commons, that the government is taking action to ensure 'that no families have to go through the same pain' experienced by those affected by the biggest maternity scandal in the history of the NHS? The Ockenden inquiry into the maternity services at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust published its final report today, concluding that 'repeated' failures in care may have led to the deaths of more than 200 babies, and of nine mothers. The individual stories of stillborn babies, infants severely and sometimes fatally harmed, and women’s pain being dismissed are deeply distressing.

What do you remember about Tim Farron's time as Lib Dem leader? Was it the position he created for his party on a hard Brexit? Or what he had to say about gay sex? He quit the leadership in June 2017, saying he had concluded that 'remaining faithful to Christ' was incompatible with being a political leader. It followed a general election campaign in which Farron, a committed evangelical Christian, was repeatedly asked about his views on homosexuality. The reason the questions kept coming, as I said at the time, was that Farron refused to give a full answer to them. Did he think gay sex was a sin? 'We are all sinners,' he responded, which wasn't an answer. Did he think homosexuality itself, even if not acted upon sexually, was a sin? Similarly vague noises.

Will the Conservatives have much evidence that they've helped the country recover from the pandemic by the next election? Even though all the indications are that the party will go for a later poll in 2024, they still do not have much time to fix the big holes that have gaped wider as a result of Covid. In many cases, such as the NHS backlog, the holes were already there before the pandemic, which makes them even harder to close up. Education is another policy area where the rhetoric and time left to fulfil it just don't seem to match up. This morning I asked Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi on Times Radio when he expected school children to have caught up the learning and attainment they lost as a result of lockdown.