Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
When Rishi Sunak told Andrew Neil this evening that he had his eyes on the future, he was ostensibly talking about the nation’s finances. But it was difficult not to conclude from his interview on GB News that he wasn’t also keeping at least one eye on his own future, too. A particularly striking exchange
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Another day, another Dom bomb. In Cummings’s latest release, a number of WhatsApp messages reveal communications between himself and the Prime Minister, with the latter describing the health secretary Matt Hancock’s performance as effing ‘hopeless’. Is this damaging to Hancock? Or is this the sentiment that you can expect from senior people who work at close
What has Dominic Cummings revealed about Matt Hancock that we didn’t already know? The most eye-catching stuff, of course, is the Prime Minister calling the health secretary ‘totally fucking hopeless’. But on the specific charges that created this impression, much of his lengthy blog on evidence reiterates what he told the select committee session last
Keir Starmer was back on his home turf at Prime Minister’s Questions today, attacking Boris Johnson for what he said was a lack of competence in containing the spread of the Delta variant. The Labour leader focused on the delay in putting India on the red list, turning one of the Prime Minister’s stock phrases
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The government has agreed its first post-Brexit bespoke trade deal. But the agreement with Australia has already caused consternation among Conservative MPs about the potential competition from Australian farmers. Are these fears overstated? James Forsyth argues yes: ‘Both its proponents and its critics exaggerate its importance. Meat prices in Asia are roughly twice what they
The government has just suffered a further verbal drubbing for the way it announced it would be delaying the roadmap out of Covid restrictions. Matt Hancock gave a statement in the Commons tonight, a couple of hours after the Prime Minister announced all the details of the delay. Before he spoke, though, he had to
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It seems Freedom Day is no longer June 21st. The writing was clearly on the wall this morning, but now the Prime Minister has officially told the public, it is likely to be another four weeks of restrictions. ‘Conservative MPs are getting really agitated by this moving of the goal posts‘ – Isabel Hardman But after
Matt Hancock enjoyed an early boost in his evidence session to the select committees investigating the lessons learned from the government’s handling of the pandemic, when one of the committee chairs Greg Clark confirmed that Dominic Cummings had not submitted written evidence for the allegations he had made in his own session. Those allegations included
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Today, talks between David Frost and the EU’s negotiator Maroš Šefčovič ended with little agreement about how to move forward on the Northern Ireland Protocol. As James Forsyth says on the podcast: ‘it didn’t end with either man walking out of the meeting, but you probably can’t say much more for it than that.’ This is partly
Normally when a Prime Minister goes on the attack in the Commons, it’s the opposition in his sights. Not so today, when Boris Johnson accidentally attacked his own MPs, including former prime minister Theresa May, for being ‘lefty’ propagandists. He was responding to questions from SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford about the cuts in foreign
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Though the amendment on foreign aid was not selected by the Speaker yesterday, the row over the budget cut is not over yet. Today MPs will have an emergency debate about the policy, and Lindsey Hoyle has advised that the government should bring the matter in front of the House in the future. This is
The Speaker’s decision to rule out an amendment which would have forced a vote on international aid cuts tells us a number of important things about the current situation in Westminster. The first is of course that Lindsay Hoyle is not John Bercow, who was prepared to ride roughshod over the advice of the clerks
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After the government cut the UK’s foreign aid budget a group of rebellious tory MPs bound together to try and reverse the decision, will it come to a head this week?‘This cut has caused some resentment amongst other nations’ – Isabel Hardman And has the culture war spread to cricket after the suspension of Ollie
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Matt Hancock defended his position at a Downing Street press conference yesterday. He told journalists that, by his ‘recollection of events’, he told the Prime Minister that hospital patients would be tested before being sent to care homes ‘when we could do it’. Dominic Cummings says the Health Secretary promised all patients would receive a
Matt Hancock’s approach to Dominic Cummings’s allegations has been to come out fighting. He believes he has spent most of today answering questions about these allegations. But Thursday night’s press conference highlighted what he has really been doing today: merely talking at length about the allegations, while dodging any real answers. No longer cushioned by eager Conservative
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After the hanger full of Dom bombs that were dropped in yesterday’s epic seven hour hearing, health secretary Matt Hancock got a sizeable chunk of Cummings wrath. Isabel Hardman talks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth about how Hancock has been handling himself since the allegations were levelled at him. James points out on the podcast that Hancock was never going to have
Matt Hancock’s first attempt to defend himself against the bombardment of allegations from Dominic Cummings went well. The health secretary appeared in the Commons to answer an urgent question from Labour’s Jon Ashworth on the matter, and he managed to get through the session without appearing beleaguered. This was partly as a result of a
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From accusing Matt Hancock of criminal incompetence, to lifting the lid on the true nature of his relationship with Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings’s evidence was nothing short of explosive. Katy Balls talks to Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth about the highlights and what we learnt. There were few who escaped Cummings’s censure. But in some
Today we heard more than seven hours of testimony from Dominic Cummings, much of it taking aim at Matt Hancock. Tomorrow it looks as though Hancock will give us several hours of his own take on the way the government – and Cummings – handled the pandemic. This evening, a spokesman for the minister said:
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Downing Street as Dominic Cummings gave his evidence to the science and technology and the health select committees this morning. As it happens, we had the chance to see Boris Johnson reacting almost in real time to the revelations and allegations from his former aide, because