Isabel Hardman

Labour's attempt to bring Tory divisions over planning reforms into the House of Commons flopped this evening, with no Conservatives at all supporting the party's opposition vay vote. They all abstained. Labour's failure to capitalise on the row following Chesham and Amersham doesn't mean the planning problem is going away It was a reasonably anodyne motion, calling on the government 'to protect the right of communities to object to individual planning applications'. But there weren't even that many Conservative MPs who turned up to the debate to be critical of the reforms as they are proposed at present. A smattering of them lambasted Labour for being opportunistic, or for overseeing inappropriate development at local government level.

Big changes afoot tonight in Sir Keir Starmer’s top team: his head of communications Ben Nunn has stepped down to pursue other projects, with deputy Paul Ovenden also resigning for family reasons. Steph Driver is taking over as director of comms while plans are being made for the new direction of the team. I understand that Nunn and Ovenden’s departures really aren’t for the same reasons. The latter has a young family and new caring responsibilities which he has decided he has to put first, but he is a particular loss for Starmer.

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 listen to a still-angry Speaker explaining why this was so unacceptable.  Hoyle wasn't the only one to complain about the way ministers had behaved Hoyle once again described the government's behaviour as 'entirely unacceptable', adding that it was 'disrespectful to the House and to our constituents'.

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 that Hancock had lied to the Prime Minister about testing of patients being discharged into care homes; that he had been told by the chief scientific adviser that not everyone who needed treatment received it; that the Cabinet Secretary had ‘lost confidence’ in the minister’s honesty; and that he had interfered in the expansion of testing capacity.

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 and convention in order to manufacture certain political confrontations and drama. Indeed, the Speaker today very pointedly opened his statement on the amendment by saying 'I respect and trust the advice from clerks in this House'. Hoyle made clear when he campaigned to be Speaker that he wanted to stop some of the games that Bercow had been playing, and that parliament deserved more respect.

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 colleagues, Hancock found himself being repeatedly asked about whether he had told No. 10 that people coming out of hospital would be tested before they were discharged into care homes. The journalists asking those questions listened as the Health Secretary refused to deny saying this, using a precise formula of words to dodge giving a full answer.